Youth Activist Summit 2025: From hashtag to action
Who are the honored youth?
🔹From Lebanon, Marina Al Khawand employs digital innovation to make healthcare more equitable and accessible.
🔹Dev Karan from India, who works to rehabilitate traditional ponds and revive local ecosystems through participatory community work.
🔹From Japan, Rina Kawasaki works to empower young people to participate in civic life and protect the environment.
🔹As for Aminata Savani from Côte d’Ivoire, she advocates digital inclusion and digital safety to help young people navigate safely in a world that is more interconnected than ever before.
🔹In Brazil, Salvino Oliveira works to expand educational and technological opportunities for young people in favelas or slums.
These five embody the summit spirit of bold leadership, creative solutions, and the power of youth to drive global change.
Medonations’ health clinic in Lebanon provides medical care to those most in need.
Marina Al Khawand: Turning tragedy into hope
We had the opportunity to speak with Marina Al Khawand, 24 years old, a Lebanese social leader and healthcare innovator. She founded the Medonations initiative – which can be translated as medicine donation – after the Beirut port explosion on August 4, 2020, as a platform to collect and distribute medicines to patients in need.
What started with a single social media post has today become a global network with collection points in more than 65 countries, providing free medicines and counseling to more than 25,000 people.
In 2022, Marina led the creation of the first free tech health clinic in Lebanon, which officially opened in 2025 with the full integration of AI technologies – becoming a pioneering space that uses digital tools to make healthcare accessible to the most vulnerable groups. It also leads the CuraLoop medical waste recycling initiative.
To understand her motivation, Marina told us how the 2020 explosion changed the course of her life. While she was only 18 years old, she decided to stay in Lebanon and contribute to relief efforts amid the devastation. In one of the most affected neighborhoods, an elderly woman was found trapped inside a building about to collapse, struggling to breathe while holding an empty medicine box.
Medonations’ health clinic in Lebanon provides medical care to those most in need.
After desperate attempts to find the medicine in pharmacies, Marina posted a photo of the package on Instagram. After only two hours, an unknown woman contacted her and offered 12 boxes of medicine.
When Marina returned to the woman who said to her: “You saved my life” Marina realized the extent of the silent pain of many. From that moment, Medonations was born – turning a personal tragedy into a global platform for hope.
When asked about hope in light of the world’s tragedies that we witness daily, Marina Al Khawand answered: “Miracles happen every day.” She shared a story that captures this perfectly: One day, she received a call from the parents of Ioana, a little girl who needed hard-to-find medicine. And it is expensive after undergoing a bone marrow transplant. Al-Khound searched through the inventory, and to her surprise, she found the same medicine — sent by a donor from Belgium — worth $10,000. It was a miracle. “Stories like this remind us why we do this work and the impact we can have every day.”
Inspiring speakers
At the summit, four inspiring speakers addressed the youth audience gathered at the United Nations Palace in Geneva. They are: Ambassador Jörg Lauber, President of the Human Rights Council for 2025, Minna Dehnert, a Swedish journalist and expert in communications and counter-disinformation, Cyril Dion, a French writer, director, poet, and environmental activist, and Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications.
In her speech, Fleming celebrated young activists as essential change-makers, calling on them to transform negative online noise into action, creativity and hope. She emphasized the importance of trusted voices, solutions-based communication, and collective mobilization to drive global change.
Fleming said: “Movements do not begin with institutions, but with individuals… with people who carry the spark of rejection of a reality that should not remain as it is. And you are that spark.”
She concluded by saying: “Narratives shape the future, and you are the ones who write what comes. I believe that together we can win the narrative and drive the change that humanity urgently needs.”
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