Gates Cambridge Scholar Amirah Sequeira has been named one of the world's top 100 young AIDS advocates.
A Gates Cambridge Scholar has been named one of the top 100 AIDS advocates in the world.
Amirah Sequeira [2014] was named one of the Poz 100 list honorees by Poz Magazine, an award-winning US print and online brand for people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS which has been publishing since 1994.
This year’s top 100 celebrates young people under 30 who Poz acknowledges were not even born when the AIDS epidemic began, although it says they may be the ones to put an end to it. The honorees were nominated by readers of the magazine.
Amirah was selected for her work as national coordinator for the Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC).
Poz says: ”Amirah Sequeira is one of the driving youth forces trying to end the AIDS epidemic. Her work focuses on organising and empowering young people to take political action against social injustice and on creating strategies for holding governments and corporations accountable.”
Amirah has been involved in AIDS activism since high school, where she trained young AIDS advocates in Canada. While working with SGAC, she has helped lead multiple campaigns to ensure full funding and sound policies for Global AIDS Programmes, establish a robin hood tax on Wall Street to fund the end of AIDS and prevent trade policies that will limit access to medicines.
Amirah is doing an MPhil in the History, Philosophy & Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Cambridge. She graduated with a BA in History and Sustainable Development from Columbia University in 2012, where her research focused on the history of needle exchange activism in New York City.
Amirah says that Poz’s decision to specifically honour the work of young people in this year’s list is very exciting. “There are so many young people across the world who are standing up against the governments and corporations that perpetuate a system that allows the AIDS pandemic to thrive,” she says. “The wide array of work that this year’s Poz 100 is doing should remind people that the AIDS pandemic is not over, that the fight to end AIDS is an intersectional fight for social justice and that government funding cuts and restricted access to affordable medicines are a deadly threat to millions of people.”
