Remarkable progress on eradicating extreme poverty and the need to accelerate efforts to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (global goals) were highlighted at the Goalkeepers events.

The 2018 Goalkeepers events focused on the potential of young people to propel global progress and highlighted themes from Bill and Melinda Gates’s 2018 Goalkeepers Data Reports. The report shows how investing in “human capital”—the health and education of young people—unlocks productivity and innovation, reduces poverty and generates prosperity.

Bill and Melinda Gates, co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, hosted the events on Sept 25 and 26 in New York.

Three new high-level partnerships, called “Accelerators”, were announced at the Goalkeepers event on Sept 26. These Accelerators will catalyze progress toward the global goals by offering funding and programmatic support toward increasing early literacy, eliminating child marriage, and empowering young people to use data to drive progress toward global goals.

Goalkeepers Youth Action Accelerator will empower young people (ages 18-35) to source and use data to hold public, private and government leaders accountable for achieving the global goals. Led by CIVICUS and the Gates Foundation, this Accelerator will provide up to 30 young leaders with hands-on and technical support, mentorship, and direct funding of up to $30,000 each. Applications will be open until Oct 31, 2019. And program participants will be announced in late November.

Scaling Early Literacy brings together Room to Read — a leading nonprofit focused on girls’ education and children’s literacy in Asia and Africa — with a variety of partners to scale the organization’s approach to increasing literacy skills and helping children develop a habit of reading early in life.

The Accelerator will expand Room to Read’s country-specific programming in India, Vietnam, and South Africa, furthering Room to Read’s goal of reaching more than 1.1 million additional children in these countries over the next three years.

The Girls First Fund, a collaborative new partnership to end child marriage, will be launched. It will identify the most promising community-based organizations, particularly those led by girls, women and youth, and provide them with multi-year funding to develop and pursue local solutions to end child marriage.

The Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards were presented on Sept 25. In partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and UNICEF, the event celebrated outstanding youth-focused work around the world that is directly linked to the 17 Global Goals.

The Campaign Award was presented to Amika George, founder of #FreePeriods, a campaign that works to ensure no girl in the United Kingdom suffers from period poverty. The Progress Award was presented to Dysmus Kisilu, founder of Solar Freeze, which provides renewable energy solutions to smallholder farmers in Kenya to increase agricultural productivity. And the Changemaker Award was presented to Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who advocates on behalf of her community and survivors of genocide.