Foday David Kamara

Foday grew up in Bumeh, a toxic slum in Sierra Leone, where his school notebooks were often scraps of paper and education was a fragile privilege. Raised by a resilient single mother who juggled survival with her family’s learning, Foday’s early life was marked by poverty, displacement, and environmental injustice. Yet he clung fiercely to education as the only bridge to possibility.

In 2021, Foday earned a full scholarship to the African Leadership University (ALU) in Rwanda, where he has studied leadership, entrepreneurship, and sustainability. But he didn’t stop there. In 2023, during a break between semesters, Foday travelled to Bokay Town, Liberia, where over 25,000 people had lived without a school for 14 years. There, he co-founded the Central Leadership Academy (CLA), which provides free, high-quality education to refugee, internally displaced and underprivileged children. It has impacted over 6,500 students directly and reached more than 12,000 people across the region – saving families over $78,000 in tuition and transportation costs and creating employment for 23 local residents. Teaching 21st-century skills like entrepreneurship, digital literacy, and trauma-informed care, CLA also hosts peer-led innovation labs – which students have used to launch everything from hygiene cooperatives to bamboo study shelters. Foday lives in the unfinished school building, mentoring students one-to-one and leading by example.

Beyond CLA, Foday works with Ecovironment, a social enterprise that recycles plastic waste into eco-friendly construction materials. His environmental innovation earned him the Young Climate Prize – as part of which he presented his story at the Guggenheim Museum in New York – and the UN Habitat Scroll of Honour, which gave him the opportunity to speak to 1,000 global delegates at UN World Habitat Day in Azerbaijan.

Foday’s academic journey has been featured by Meta Sustainability Magazine, Dezeen and Bloomberg, and he has received support from the Bestseller Foundation and UN-Habitat to expand his research into community-based sustainability models and education reform. Today, he mentors youth changemakers across West Africa and runs initiatives like the "Letters Without Borders" Pen Pal programme, a storytelling exchange between CLA students and youth in Kenya and Rwanda. Through handwritten letters exchanged every quarter and delivered via partner organisations, students share stories of their communities, challenges and dreams. For many, it is their first interaction with someone from another country, and the process builds confidence, cultural awareness and pride in their identity.

If he wins the Global Student Prize, Foday plans to provide bicycles to long-distance CLA students, especially girls; establish a solar-powered computer lab and digital literacy programme; launch a mobile learning unit for remote, displaced children; and introduce trauma-informed wellness programmes for students who are refugees from war.