Dysmus Kisilu is the founder of Solar Freeze, a company that provides renewable energy solutions as a service to smallholder farmers in Kenya to increase agricultural productivity. Solutions include solar powered irrigation kits and solar powered cold storage units. To date, Dysmus has worked with 3,000 small scale women farmers in Kenya to increase agricultural yields by more than 150% from 2016.

Dysmus is also the founder of ‘Each One, Teach One - Train and Earn’ an initiative within Solar Freeze that aims to impact the next generation of renewable energy and climate smart agriculture leaders. It does this by mentoring young people aged 18-29 in the operation, maintenance and repair of renewable energy equipment and through skills transfer on climate smart agriculture. As a result, this skills-transfer program has enabled 100 young people to learn and earn an income.

Dysmus has been widely recognized for his work in renewable energy and smallholder agriculture.

Nadia Murad is a 24-year-old Yazidi woman who advocates on behalf of her community and survivors of genocide.

Nadia’s peaceful life was savagely interrupted in 2014 when ISIS attacked her homeland in Sinjar with the intention of ethnically cleansing Iraq of all Yazidis. She was among the thousands of Yazidi women who were abducted and enslaved by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS). Over 1300 Yazidi women remain in captivity. The ISIS genocide that began on August 3, 2014, now threatens the future of the Yazidi people in Iraq.

Nadia is the founder and president of Nadia’s Initiative, a foundation supporting women and minorities through the redevelopment and stabilization of communities in crisis. Presently, Nadia and her team are focused on the Sinjar region of Iraq through the foundation’s newly created Sinjar Action Fund.

Amika George is the 18-year-old student founder of #FreePeriods, a campaign that aims to make sure that no girl in the UK is suffering from period poverty. It calls on the government to provide free menstrual products to all children on free school meals.

The #FreePeriods campaign also acts to destigmatise menstruation, encouraging collective action in the fight against period poverty and the taboo which shrouds periods in general.

#FreePeriods uses its platforms to educate the public on period poverty as well as signposting to partners helping wide ranging groups such as schoolgirls, women’s agencies, refugees, asylum seekers and food bank users, in the UK and internationally.

In December 2017 #FreePeriods co-organised a demonstration at Downing Street, which over 2000 people attended. Amika’s petition to provide girls from low income families with sanitary products gathered 180,000 signatures by August 2018, as well support from numerous MPs and celebrities. Following the demonstration, the British government gave £1.5 million in funds to address period poverty.

Everybody has the right to information. That’s why Cornelia developed “Wefugees”, an interactive platform where refugees and volunteers can ask and answer questions. The Wefugee community is constantly growing, and now counts over 8,000 regular users per month; all in all, about 20,000 people have used the site.

The idea came to Cornelia in 2015 when she was finding it difficult to keep track of what was happening in the multiple new and different help groups for refugees on the major social networks. She wanted, therefore, to bring another option to the table. Together with the Charta der Vielfalt (a German charter for diversity in the workplace), the German Chancellery, the Deutsche Telekom telecommunications company, and Deutsche Welle and other German media outlets, Cornelia had already been running a collaborative co design workshop with refugees from all sorts of backgrounds. It was here that the idea for Wefugee was born.

Today, Wefugee is the biggest worldwide question and answer platform for refugees, even though it is currently only used within Germany. In 2018, Cornelia was included in Forbes’ list of 30 under 30 Europe: Social entrepreneurs. Through her initiative, she brings people together, breaks down barriers, fosters understanding and helps the users of her site to keep a high level of visibility, which will ultimately allow them to integrate into their new society successfully and over the long-term.

Natalie Robi Tingo is a Youth Power Accountability Advocate from Kenya working towards the fulfilment of Global Goal 5 target 3 using awareness and youth-led accountability. A survivor of violence herself, she is influenced by her own experiences growing up in a community where 8 in 10 girls wake up to the reality of having their genitalia cut off and being married as children.

She founded Msichana Empowerment Kuria to give young girls and women a voice, and to end Female Genital Mutilation and all other forms of violence against women and girls. She has facilitated village dialogues on ending the cut, leveraging innovation to build sustainable models and initiatives to accelerate the abandonment of the cut and to demystify myths and misconceptions on FGM as a social norm.