OPEN Aresty Speaker Carol Bellamy – The Plight and Rights of Children

How can we stem the continuing erosion of protections of the world’s most vulnerable citizens: children?
Ask Carol Bellamy.

Ms Carol Bellamy is currently Chair of the Governing Board of the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund (GCERF), whose main objective is to support community-level initiatives aimed at strengthening resilience against violent extremism.

It’s just her latest approach to protecting the world’s most vulnerable citizens: children.

In her role as former Director of the Peace Corps, Executive Director of UNICEF, Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund, or President and CEO of World Learning, Ms. Bellamy has arguably done more to help children in any one of those past positions, than most of us will accomplish in a lifetime.

Credited with modernizing and strengthening many of those organizations, her core priority has always been the survival, development, and education of even the most severely disadvantaged children around the world.

She shifted focus from simply ensuring children’s survival to a more contemporary concern: defending their right to be safe from sexual exploitation, dangerous work, armed conflicts, and other hazards such as HIV and AIDS. Ensuring that when migrant children come to new countries to find a better future through education, that they are not marginalized or denied access to quality education. And fighting the stubborn discrimination that denies girls all over the world from having the same chance of schooling as a boy.

OPEN Aresty Speaker Carol Bellamy will deliver the keynote at this year’s St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs, sharing what’s next in addressing children’s rights and how we can work together to better their chance of a thriving future.