The Rafael M. Salas Memorial Lecture series provides a unique forum for distinguished guest lecturers to discuss important aspects of population and development.
This year’s lecture – Championing Change: Youth, Rights, and the Power to Transform Societies – will be delivered by Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya, a world-renowned educator and advocate for girls’ health and human rights.
The lecture will be followed by a high-level interactive panel discussion moderated by Yoshita Singh, Chief Correspondent, Press Trust of India.
The 20th Rafael M. Salas Memorial Lecture will take place on Tuesday, 17 December, 2024, from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. EST in the ECOSOC Chamber in the UN Secretariat Building.
On the lecture series:
The lecture series was initiated in 1989 as a tribute to Mr. Rafael M. Salas, who served as the first Executive Director of UNFPA. Under his leadership, UNFPA grew into the world’s largest provider of multilateral population assistance. The first lecture was delivered by The Honorable Dr. Saburo Okita, former Foreign Minister of Japan, on Population and Development. The most recent speaker, in 2023, was Dr. Peter Piot, Special Advisor to the European Commission President, Professor of Global Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and former Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), on the topic of global health.
More about Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya:
Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya, President and Founder of Kakenya’s Dream, is a world-renowned educator and advocate for girls’ health and human rights. She has dedicated her life to creating lasting change in rural communities in Kenya and across Africa. After escaping child marriage and surviving female genital mutilation (FGM) as a young teenager, Dr. Ntaiya became the first woman from her indigenous Maasai village in Kenya to attend university in the United States. In 2009, while studying for her Ph.D. in education at the University of Pittsburgh, she founded Kakenya’s Dream to empower vulnerable girls through education, health and leadership programmes to become agents of change. Dr. Ntaiya was featured in Bill Gates’ Heroes in the Field series in 2022 and Melinda French Gates’ first book, The Moment of Lift. She has been named a Top Ten CNN Hero, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and one of Newsweek’s “150 Women Who Shake the World.”
