Top 25 Women of Influence 2018: Kehkashan Basu

Kehkashan Basu

Environmental & Children’s Rights Activist

Empowering young people like herself is Kehkashan Basu’s passion. In 2012, at just 12 years old, she started Green Hope Foundation, a youth organisation working on Education for Sustainable Development, children’s rights and environmental protection, with the goal of empowering young people to utilize their power to make a difference. The organization seeks to provide a networking platform to children and youth, especially girls, to carry forward the Rio legacy through several environmental workshops and ground level projects on promoting gender equality, climate justice, stopping land degradation, biodiversity conservation, waste segregation and reversing land degradation. While the organization now has over 1000 members across the Middle East, India, Brazil, USA, Canada, Europe and Southeast Asia, in January 2018 Basu led a team of Green Hope members to Syrian refugee camps on the border of Lebanon and conducted environmental workshops for over 600 refugee children, turning into reality the UN mandate of “leave no one behind.”

Who else are we honouring? See the full Women of Influence Top 25 list for 2018.