Cork woman awarded Global Citizen Prize for work in poverty and food security

Sophie Healy Thow

A young Cork woman has been awarded a Global Citizen Prize for her pioneering work in the field of poverty and food security.

Sophie Healy-Thow, a 26-year-old native of Kinsale, was one of five winners of the prestigious prize recognised at the Global Citizen awards ceremony in New York.

Ms Healy-Thow, a one-time winner of the grand prize at Ireland’s Young Scientist competition, is the founder of Act4Food, a youth-led campaign which, in its own words, “mobilises the power of young people to call for a global food system which provides everyone with access to safe, affordable and nutritious diets, while simultaneously protecting nature, tackling climate change and promoting human rights.”

The campaign has at its heart the expressed desire of Ms Healy-Thow for young people to be at the heart of societal decision-making which will eventually impact their own generation more than any other.

The Global Citizen Prize honours people who have excelled in their own fields and who have made changes to combat poverty.

“I feel so excited, so overwhelmed and so grateful,” Ms Healy-Thow, who attended the ceremony with her mother, said of her award.

She said it had been her granny and her mum who had set her on a career path of food sustainability and innovation.

“I grew up in a household where my father really struggled with alcohol addiction, so that when we grew up the family income kind of went towards that unfortunately,” she said.

But when I moved to be closer to my grandmother in Cork, she had apple trees, she went periwinkle picking on the coast of Kinsale, she harvested seaweed and dried seaweed and she thought us about all of these old-Ireland practices.

Ms Healy-Thow's victory at the 2014 Young Scientist involved a project investigating ways to increase crop growth for farmers in the era of climate change.

She said that victory had led her “on this trajectory of activism within the food space, and full circle here to Global Citizen”.

Her Global Citizen award is just the latest in a series of high-profile achievements.

Previously, Ms Healy-Thow was named as one of the 10 women leaders featured in the Disney book Choose to Matter, and was recognised by Time magazine as one of the world’s most influential teens.

She serves on the board of international charity ActionAid UK together with the Emergency Nutrition Network, and was previously appointed as a group leader within the UN’s Scaling Up Nutrition Movement.