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Some people talk about changing the world. These young people are actually doing it.

From tackling maternal mortality in Cameroon to fighting food insecurity in the U.S., these "Goalkeepers" are making their mark on global development goals.

Photo by Chris Farber/Getty Images for Gates Archive

The 2023 Goalkeepers Awards honored activists from opposite sides of the globe.

The past two centuries have seen humanity transform into a truly interconnected global community. Like any community, we have our virtues and strengths as well as our challenges that require collective effort to overcome.

The United Nations created 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 to help us focus our efforts on vital areas of concern, including poverty, gender equality, education, food security, health, climate and more. And every year since then, changemakers have arisen to meet those goals in various ways. Some of these changemakers are already leaders on the world stage, from heads of state to global celebrities. But others are grassroots activists doing incredible work on the ground to move us toward meeting our SDG targets by the 2030 deadline.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation calls these people Goalkeepers and honors them at an awards ceremony each year. This year's young activist Goalkeepers hail from Cameroon, Ethiopia and the United States, and their work on different goals in different countries is an inspiring example of how any one of us can arise and be of service to humanity no matter where we live.

Meet this year's award recipients:

Ashu Martha Agbornyenty at the Goalkeepers awards

Ashu Martha Agbornyenty was named the 2023 Changemaker at the Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards.

Photo by Kevin Hagen/Getty Images for Gates Archive

2023 Changemaker Award: Ashu Martha Agbornyenty

The Changemaker Award celebrates an individual who has inspired change either from a position of leadership or through personal experience. Ashu Martha Agbornyenty is a midwife dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safer in Cameroon, where maternal mortality rates are high. She writes about the work of midwives and shares her knowledge of pregnancy through her blog, Marthie’s Midwifery Diary, and she also founded the For Mom & Baby Foundation, which provides community workshops and distributes emergency kits containing essential birth supplies to pregnant women in crisis-stricken areas. Since 2021, the foundation has distributed over 1,000 emergency kits and reached more than 2,400 women and girls in the region.

"Midwives are essential to achieving the Global Goals for Sustainable Development, including Goal 3: Good health and well-being for all. They provide care to millions of women and children around the world, and they play a vital role in improving maternal and child health outcomes," Agbornyenty shared on her Facebook page.

However, she added, "Despite their important role, midwives are often underrepresented in policy-making circles. This is a problem because it means that the voices of midwives and the people they serve are not being heard when important decisions are being made about maternal and child health." She dedicated her award to all midwives. Learn more about her work here.

Eden Tadesse at the podium

Eden Tadesse speaks at the 2023 Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards.

Photo by Mike Lawerence/Getty Images for Gates Archive

2023 Progress Award: Eden Tadesse

The Progress Award celebrates an individual who supports progress via a science, technology, digital, or business initiative. This year's award was presented to Eden Tadesse, an Ethiopian journalist, social entrepreneur, digital innovator, and human rights activist dedicated to helping refugees thrive. Tadesse founded the online global impact platform Invicta, which promotes digital financial inclusion, skills development and access to job opportunities for urban refugees. More than 35,000 people from 90 countries have registered on Invicta, 7,000 have completed online courses and more than 2,200 refugees have employment through the platform.

According to the UNHCR, the United Nations' refugee agency, 108.4 million people worldwide are currently forcibly displaced, and the majority of refugees are hosted by low-income countries. Refugees often face a mountain of obstacles as they resettle away from their countries of origin, from legal hurdles to access to education to finding work to prejudice and discrimination.

"I imagine a world where every refugee in every part of the world leads a meaningful, dignified life where they are economically empowered, safe and self-reliant," Tadesse says. Invicta is a one-stop tool for refugees to get connected with the educational, financial, mental health and other tools they need. Learn more about Invicta here.

Founders of The Farmlink Project

The founders of The Farmlink Project, Ben Collier, James Kanoff and Aiden Reilly with Sabrina Elba at the 2023 Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards

Photo by Chris Farber/Getty Images for Gates Archive

2023 Campaign Award: The Farmlink Project

The Campaign Award celebrates a campaign that has raised awareness or built a community by inspiring action and creating change. This year's Campaign Award was presented to The Farmlink Project, founded by Aidan Reilly, Ben Collier, and James Kanoff, for its work advocating for and building community around food equity in the United States.

The Farmlink Project was started in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its purpose is to connect people experiencing food insecurity with surplus produce that will otherwise go to waste.

"No one should have to go to bed hungry while perfectly viable produce goes to waste. This produce shouldn’t have to be 'rescued' from rotting in fields or being sent to the landfill, either; why were we ever letting this produce go to waste in the first place?" asks The Farmlink Project. "These are systemic issues that our society needs to address."

In a perfect world, The Farmlink Project says, their organization wouldn’t need to exist because "systems would be in place to streamline the supply chain so that zero percent, rather than 30 to 40 percent, of food grown in the United States went to waste." For now, though, it acts as a “link” connecting the broken supply chains.

"Our long-term goal is to set up infrastructure which will render our work obsolete," the organization shares on its website. "If there were no food waste, if there were no hungry people lining up outside understocked and underfunded food banks, there would be no need for The Farmlink Project. That’s the dream. We’ve got a lot of work to do before we get there, though. We need you to help us put ourselves out of business."

Through its network of more than 600 student fellows and 6,000 volunteers, The Farmlink Project has provided 83 million meals and transferred more than 130 million pounds of nutritious food to communities facing hunger. Learn more here.

We are at the halfway mark toward the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal deadline. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but if leaders like these Goalkeepers can inspire more of us to action, we'll be that much closer to reaching our collective targets for a more sustainable global society.

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A surprising solution to global poverty, from one of the wealthiest men in the world.

"Can a chicken change the world?"

It's an intriguing question. It appeared on a minimalist poster board outside the elevator on the 68th floor of 4 World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan on June 8, 2016.

"It begins with a chicken," read another sign.

Photo by Jon Comulada/Upworthy.

Behind the signs was a makeshift chicken coop — built out of selectively shabby wood and wire — placed amid stunning views of lower Manhattan and the Hudson River.

Inside the makeshift chicken coop were 13 chickens and ... one of the richest men in the world.

Photo by Jon Comulada/Upworthy.

Yep, that's right. Billionaire tech CEO and philanthropist Bill Gates was standing in a chicken coop.

Gates, the godfather of Silicon Valley and the man against whom all American wealth is measured, really isn't your stereotypical cartoon billionaire, like Mr. Burns from "The Simpsons."

In fact, despite his Burns-esque body language in the picture above, he's kind of the opposite. Instead of dumping chemicals in the local watering hole or stowing away cash in the Cayman Islands, Bill and his wife Melinda spend their time and incredible wealth doing ... well ... good things.

So, what good things was Gates planning to do with all these chickens?

The chickens are part of his latest initiative: Coop Dreams.

Photo by Jon Comulada/Upworthy.

Started by Heifer International, Coop Dreams is now supported by Gates, who is donating 100,000 chickens to extremely impoverished communities all over the world.

The Gates Foundation does a lot of work with agriculture around the world, although so far its focus has largely been on seeds.

While Gates says they've made good strides creating seeds that are "more productive and disease-resistant," he also explained, over the chorus of clucking birds, "There’s a huge part of it now that has to do with livestock."

Livestock — in this case chickens — is a gift that keeps on giving, Gates says. Chickens are an economic opportunity that literally multiplies itself and can help lift people out of poverty.

A Coop Dreams starter kit includes a rooster and several hens.

Within a year, farmers can have hundreds of egg-laying chickens. They can eat the chickens, eat the eggs, or sell the chickens in nearby cities for around $5 U.S. They can then use the money to buy food, medicine, or anything else they need.

In time, a farmer who raises and sells 250 chickens per year can bring in around $1,250 annually.

Photo by Jon Comulada/Upworthy.

Once Coop Dreams hands out the starter kits, they stick around to teach participants how to house, feed, vaccinate, and otherwise care for the new flocks.

Right now in West Africa, only 5% of households own chickens, Gates says. He hopes Coop Dreams will help get that number up to about 30%.

To be fair, not every country is interested in chicken gifts. The government of Bolivia, led by President Evo Morales, rejected Gates' chicken donation because of its policy of turning down Western development aid.

The chickens are gifted to small, independent farmers for their own benefit, not major farms that stimulate the country-wide economy.

Annie Bergman has seen the world-changing power of chickens firsthand.

As part of her job as the global communications Director for Heifer International, Bergman visits communities that have received chickens to see how the project is affecting their lives.

Photo by Jon Comulada/Upworthy.

"We did a lot of earthquake relief with the folks that were affected [in Nepal] last year," Bergman told Upworthy of her recent trip.

"I saw one woman who had been raising chickens and lost a number of her livestock due to exposure and shock after the earthquake. [She] took her savings and reinvested specifically in chickens. When we went in with her, with her chickens, her face just immediately lit up. It was clear that this was the path for her to continue, even though she had lost everything months beforehand."

As the parable goes: "Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." In the case of Coop Dreams, instead of fish, it's chickens. And instead of men, it's women.

"You can go through crop by crop," Gates told us. "Some crops — both men and women do. Some are almost entirely men."

Chicken-rearing, which requires regular tending, is a chore controlled almost entirely by the women of the household.

Mbene Sarr, a Coop Dreams participant. Image via YouTube/Heifer International.

There's a doubly cool benefit to giving women the responsibility of managing the chicken coops: Study after study shows that when income starts flowing to women in these communities, everyone benefits.

Why? According to Gates, "If you get the income going to the mother, then it’s used for nutrition and school fees a higher percentage of the time than if it’s going to the male."

The most amazing part of Coop Dreams is the way it encourages recipients to spread the wealth — "wealth" being chickens, of course.

Participants in the Coop Dreams program are required — yes, required — to donate their flock's first offspring to another family in need. Heifer International calls it "passing on the gift."

Farmers generally donate their chicks to another family in their community, and often donate to the younger generation, which has a multiplicative effect on their community's ability to escape extreme poverty.

Photo by Jon Comulada/Upworthy.

So — what's the answer? Can a chicken change the world?

Extreme poverty is a problem that is both gigantic and multifaceted. There is no one solution to it, and of course Bill Gates knows that.

Perhaps the irony of unveiling a solution to global poverty in one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world wasn't lost on Bill. Maybe it was even intentional. We can all help the world move forward, and we don't have to be billionaires to do it. We just have to be paying attention.

And yes, the chickens are a tiny, clucking, head-bopping step in that direction.

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