“Everyone in the community knew that I was the next [to get pregnant], but I was so determined that until I achieve my dream of becoming an accountant, I will not drop out of school, and I will not get pregnant,” said Rebecca Acio, a 19-year-old Ambassador for the Strengthening School-Community Accountability for Girls’ Education (SAGE) DREAMS Project, Uganda. She spoke at a recent Wilson Center event on emerging lessons from the DREAMS Innovation Challenge. As a peer educator at her school in Lira, Uganda, and a temporary dropout herself, Acio “knew what it cost to be a dropout” and worked to identify other at-risk girls to encourage them to stay in school.

In January 2017, President Anthony Carmona swore in Nikoli Edwards, age 25, as the youngest temporary senator in Trinidad and Tobago’s history. “I have been very much involved in piecing together the puzzle when it comes to how we develop the holistic young person in Trinidad and Tobago,” said Senator Nikoli Edwards in a Wilson Center interview with Roger-Mark De Souza, a Wilson Center Global Fellow, on Edwards’s personal journey into youth advocacy and the importance of engaging young people in decision-making.

Poor quality care is now a bigger barrier to reducing mortality than insufficient access to healthcare, said Dr. Margaret Kruk, Chair of The Lancet Global Health Commission on High Quality Health Systems in the Sustainable Development Goal Era. She spoke at a recent Wilson Center event on strategies to improve and sustain high-quality reproductive, maternal, and newborn care at scale. “We estimate that 8.6 million lives are lost every year due to lack of access to high quality care, and of that 8.6 million, five million lives are lost by people who have already reached out to the health system.”