Alumni Spotlight: Dr. Priya Shankar MD, MPH & Ricky Sharma MPP
Founded by Dr Priya Shankar MD, MPH and Ricky Sharma MPP, Adolescent Health Champions is a registered 501c3 NGO based in the USA that trains adolescent youth in India and globally as peer-to-peer educators and health leaders (“Champions”) in their schools and communities. The curriculum focuses on the leading causes of adolescent morbidity and mortality and emphasizes the role which gender inequality plays in contributing to adverse health outcomes experienced by India’s girls and women. Their Champions first learn about critical health topics such as nutrition and anemia, mental health, gender-based violence, menstruation, substance abuse, COVID-19 and reproductive health. They then lead the educational process in their schools and communities to support one another during adolescence. AHC works with local non-profits, parents, educators, physicians, and policymakers to provide a supportive ecosystem and positively influence health outcomes for adolescents. AHC’s (and flagship program Girls Health Champions’) work has been recognized by the Government of India’s Smart Fifty Program (sponsored by the Department of Science & Technology), MassChallenge, the WeWork Creator Award, D-Prize, and the Harvard University President’s Innovation Challenge.
India has the world’s largest adolescent population with over 240 million youth. Social pressures & gender inequality make adolescent girls particularly vulnerable to health and educational consequences. Due to societal, cultural, and religious taboos, the health education required to overcome these challenges is often poorly taught or completely missing during in-school education. As a result, millions of youth suffer an unacceptable burden of health and educational consequences into adulthood. To date, AHC has worked in 20 schools in India, including Mumbai, Bengaluru, New Delhi alongside Indian partner organizations. AHC has trained a pan-India network of 1,300+ Champion peer educators who have educated 8,000+ youth about adolescent health and gender via sessions in their schools and sparked 30,000+ health conversations led by Champions outside of school. AHC has demonstrated the impact of its youth-led peer education model in a research study published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, the Annals of Global Health; the study showed that the AHC programme increased youth health knowledge by 48 percent and positively shifted health and gender attitudes by 42 percent. Our Champions conduct a variety of youth-led health and gender sessions in their schools throughout the academic year, promoting knowledge dissemination, driving attitude shifts, and facilitating healthy behaviours in their schools and communities.
Priya graduated from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with an MPH in 2016.