People & Lifestyle
Global Citizen Announces the 2022 winners of Global Citizen Prize and Cisco Youth Leadership Award

This year’s Global Citizen Prize 2022 will be recognized across three categories: to Defend the Planet, Defeat Poverty, and Demand Equity, with a focus on climate change, empowering adolescent girls, and breaking down systemic poverty barriers. With 2-3 changemaker awardees per category, the winners will receive a year-long programme of support from Global Citizen, together with a donation to their organization. Proud partners of the Global Citizen Prize 2022 include Cisco, Citi and P&G.
The Global Citizen Prize: Citizen Award 2022 honors people who go above and beyond to make the world a better place; people who inspire you to stand up and take action and recognises recipients making extraordinary efforts championing the vulnerable in our communities. This year’s awardees include: Anuscheh Amir-Khalili, Activist & Social Entrepreneur, Flamingo e.V. (Germany); Barbie Izquierdo, Activist, Consultant, & Community Empowerment Manager, Hunger Free America (USA); Brianna Fruean, Climate Activist, Pacific Climate Warriors (Samoa), Khanyisile Motsa, Founder & Director, Berea-Hillbrow Home of Hope (South Africa); Mitzy Violeta Cortés Guzmán, Defender of the Earth, Futuros Indígenas Network (Mexico); Payzee Mahmod, Child Marriage Survivor & Campaigner, IKWRO – Women’s Rights Organisation (United Kingdom); Yemi Adamolekun, Executive Director, Enough is Enough (EiE), (Nigeria).
The Global Citizen Prize: Cisco Youth Leadership Award was established by Cisco and Global Citizen, to celebrate an individual aged 18-30 who has contributed meaningfully towards the goal of ending extreme poverty in their community, through their leadership, dedication, and innovation. The prize winner will receive a substantial donation to their organization to enable its continued growth. Candidates were judged, by a panel of representatives from Global Citizen, Cisco, and esteemed activists and leaders in the international development field, against five equally-weighted criteria, including impact, vision, catalyst, global citizenship, and technology innovation.
This year’s Cisco Youth Leadership Award winner is Nidhi Pant from India. Nidhi is a chemical engineer and co-founder of S4S Technologies, a farm-gate food processing platform that converts farm losses into value-added products through the intervention of sustainable solar-powered technology. The organization increases family incomes and empowers women to be climate champions and decision-makers by transforming women farmers into micro-entrepreneurs through access to app-enabled market linkage, solar technology, bancarization, and financing. S4S Technologies works with over 24,000 farmers and 800 female entrepreneurs to prevent 40,000 tons of produce from being wasted and saves 37,000 tons of CO2 annually.
“Addressing the world’s most pressing issues will require the innovative, passionate efforts of young entrepreneurs like Nidhi, leading the next generation of global leaders who will help usher in a more inclusive, sustainable future,” said Fran Katsoudas, EVP and Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer of Cisco. “Cisco is proud to recognize and support Nidhi’s incredible work leveraging innovative technology solutions to reduce waste and empower women farmers and families across India.”
Liza Henshaw, President of Global Citizen said: “Global Citizen is honored to recognize these remarkable changemakers who have the vision, foresight and persistence to make meaningful strides towards building a better future through their pivotal work. Given the urgent need for innovative solutions to deal with the challenges of defending the planet, defeating poverty, and demanding equity, we need individuals like our awardees who are ready to take immediate action.”
The celebrated winners will be honored at a prestigious intimate private dinner event, taking place on Sunday, May 22, in New York’s iconic Gotham Hall. The event recognizes the work of those making extraordinary efforts to change the world and an exclusive stream of the Global Citizen Prize event will air on YouTube and Twitter on June 2, 2022, at 12:00pm ET.
The awardees will also be in attendance at the Global Citizen NOW, a 2-day summit, held in New York City, from Sunday May 22, until Monday May 23. Global Citizen NOW will bring together 200 leaders across the private sector, advocacy, entertainment, government and philanthropy. Focused on impact, action and innovation, Global Citizen NOW’s dynamic program will feature fireside conversations and panel discussions married with visual arts and first-person story-telling from those at the forefront of Ending Extreme Poverty NOW.
Global Citizen NOW is supported by Cisco, Citi, Harith General Partners, P&G and Verizon.
For more information about the Global Citizen Prize: Citizen Award 2022, Cisco Youth Leadership Award, and Global Citizen NOW visit www.globalcitizen.org and follow @GlblCtzn Twitter, Facebook and Instagram using #GlobalCitizen.
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Meta’s AI AI machine translation research helps break language barriers

Today, Meta announced that it has built and open sourced ‘No Language Left Behind’ NLLB-200, a single AI model that is the first to translate across 200 different languages, including 55 African languages with state-of-the-art results. Meta is using the modelling techniques and learnings from the project to improve and extend translations on Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia.
In an effort to develop high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world’s low-resource languages, this single AI model was designed with a focus on African languages. They are challenging from a machine translation perspective. AI models require lots and lots of data to help them learn, and there’s not a lot of human translated training data for these languages. For example, there’s more than 20M people who speak and write in Luganda but examples of this written language are extremely difficult to find on the internet.
We worked with professional translators for each of these languages to develop a reliable benchmark which can automatically assess translation quality for many low-resource languages. We also work with professional translators to do human evaluation too, meaning people who speak the languages natively evaluate what the AI produced. The reality is that a handful of languages dominate the web, so only a fraction of the world can access content and contribute to the web in their own language. We want to change this by creating more inclusive machine translations systems – ones that unlock access to the web for the more than 4B people around the world that are currently excluded because they do not speak one of the few languages content is available in.
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“It’s impressive how much AI is improving all of our services. We just open-sourced an AI model we built that can translate across 200 different languages — many of which aren’t supported by current translation systems. We call this project No Language Left Behind, and the AI modelling techniques we used are helping make high quality translations for languages spoken by billions of people around the world. To give a sense of the scale, the 200-language model has over 50 billion parameters, and we trained it using our new Research SuperCluster, which is one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers. The advances here will enable more than 25 billion translations every day across our apps. Communicating across languages is one superpower that AI provides, but as we keep advancing our AI work it’s improving everything we do — from showing the most interesting content on Facebook and Instagram, to recommending more relevant ads, to keeping our services safe for everyone,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post on his Facebook profile.
Language is our culture, identity, and lifeline to the world. However, as high-quality translation tools don’t exist for hundreds of languages, billions of people today can’t access digital content or participate fully in conversations and communities online in their preferred or native languages. This is especially true for hundreds of millions of people who speak the many languages of Africa.
“Africa is a continent with very high linguistic diversity, and language barriers exist day to day. We are pleased to announce that 55 African languages will be included in this machine translation research, making it a major breakthrough for our continent,” Balkissa Ide Siddo, Public Policy Director for Africa said while speaking about the launch of the AI model. “In the future, imagine visiting your favourite Facebook group, coming across a post in Igbo or Luganda, and being able to understand it in your own language with just a click of a button – that’s where we hope research like this leads us. Highly accurate translations in more languages could also help to spot harmful content and misinformation, protect election integrity, and curb instances of online sexual exploitation and human trafficking.”
While commenting on accessibility and inclusion in the pursuit of building an equitable metaverse, Ide Siddo added “At Meta, we are working today to ensure that as many people as possible will be able to access the new educational, social and economic opportunities that the next evolution of the internet will bring to future technology and an everyday living experience tomorrow.”
To confirm that the translations are high quality, Meta also created a new evaluation dataset, FLORES-200, and measured NLLB-200’s performance in each language. Results revealed that NLLB-200 exceeds the previous state of the art by an average of 44 percent.
Meta is also open-sourcing the NLLB-200 model and publishing a slew of research tools to enable other researchers to extend this work to more languages and build more inclusive technologies. Meta AI is also providing up to $200,000 of grants to non-profit organizations for real world applications for NLLB-200.
There are versions of Wikipedia in more than 300 languages, but most have far fewer articles than the 6+ million available in English. Following Meta’s partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that hosts Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects, modelling techniques and learnings from the NLLB research are now also being applied to translation systems used by Wikipedia editors. Using the Wikimedia Foundation’s Content Translation Tool, articles can now be easily translated in more than 20 low-resource languages (those that don’t have extensive datasets to train AI systems), including 10 that previously were not supported by any machine translation tools on the platform.
To explore a demo of NLLB-200 showing how the model can translate stories from around the world, visit here. You can also read the research paper here.
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