Happy International Youth Day 2020

The Academy in Mombasa joined the world in celebrating International Youth Day, which is commemorated every year on 12 August. The day spotlights some of the issues young people experience throughout the world and how best they can be remedied.

The theme for this year, ‘Youth Engagement for Global Action’, seeks to highlight the ways in which the engagement of young people at the local, national and global levels is enriching local and international organisations and processes, as well as draw lessons on how their representation and engagement in formal institutional politics can be significantly enhanced.

On this day, we celebrate all the students at the Academy and the youth around the world who are helping to shape their communities and working to build a better future.

Beyond International Youth Day being a day for reflection, it is a day for taking action. As young people, our students have actively been engaged in several initiatives that draw awareness to various issues as they strive to find solutions.

Here are some initiatives our students have been undertaking:

1. iSEAyou – a community service group co-founded by Diploma Programme student Cinzia Torriani, which promotes environmental sustainability.
2. Funza – a student led service organisation that aims to push for educational reform in public schools by empowering students to express themselves confidently and articulately.
3. Affordable and Accessible Sanitation for Women (AASW) – a youth-led initiative founded by Alumni Ziyaan Virji, which fights period and stigma and promotes menstrual hygiene. In the month of May 2020, AASW and several partner organisations launched the first-ever International Period Month.
4. Model United Nations (MUN) – an enrichment, which is an academic simulation of the actual United Nations where students delegate and attempt to find solutions to major global issues.

Happy International Youth Day!