The 2022 International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) secretariat has named SERAC-Bangladesh’s Executive Director SM Shaikat for the 2022 Youth Trailblazer Award. He is among the 50 global youth leaders working in family planning and SRHR who have been chosen for this honor from more than 300 youth worldwide, which is named in recognition of the important leadership and innovation.
This prestigious Award aims to amplify and highlight the voices of young leaders in the family planning and SRHR field through active planning and participation in the 2022 ICFP. The 2022 ICFP Youth Trailblazer Awardees will play an essential role in providing a youth perspective, voice, and experience to the conference. Young leaders who are awarded the Award will join the ICFP and the Youth Preconference in Pattaya City, Thailand in November 2022.
SM Shaikat founded the Bangladesh National Youth Conference on Family Planning which SERAC hosts annually since 2016 and made a sustainable shared space for youth and high-level policy makers, and FP and SRHR agencies in Bangladesh to raise advocacy issues, and account for policy commitments by government and stakeholders. With his leadership, SERAC is leading the formation of Urban Youth Councils in 4 cities of Bangladesh with the support from the United Nations and leading many other innovative programs. He was also elected as the Youth Advisor for Asia Pacific at UN-Habitat Youth Advisory Board in 2015.
Over the past one decade, Shaikat and his organization SERAC have become an exemplary leader in youth programming, their meaningful engagement and a loud voice in regional and global spaces to magnify the voices of young people in Bangladesh and beyond. The ICFP2022 secretariat at the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and reproductive Health congratulated him with exceptional honor by publishing this announcement over internet-based platforms and the ICFP2022 conference website on 14th of March, 2022.
