A 17-year-old girl from Bengaluru has been chosen the president of the United Nations Girl Up Coalition campaign in Los Angeles.
Vedha Arikatla, a 12th-grader at Vidyashilp Academy, will lead the campaign focusing on the empowerment of girl children. She was offered the opportunity to head the Los Angeles Coalition, which consists of 64 clubs, as she is a US citizen.
According to the organisers, with 3,000 clubs all over the world, the initiative has many leading schools and colleges as its members.
Introduced to a girl up club in school, Vedha started her own club for the state during the lockdown and named it ‘Girl Up Karnataka’. The club soon had 30 members and garnered 3,000 followers on Instagram in a month. The Instagram page posted live videos of celebrities such as Sonu Sood, Urvashi Rautela and Raashi Khanna, attracting people to the cause of gender equality.
Vedha said: “We stand for empowering women and making them feel confident in society by trying to eliminate the barriers that may arise due to the gender.”