Across the world, young people are shaping the future in many fields. Their ideas are transforming communities and society. Here’s a look at the achievements of four inspirational young leaders.

Kwiri Yang

Kwiri is the founder and CEO of LifeGyde, an online platform for young people to seek advice, guidance and support. She has an impressive track record of supporting individuals and small businesses.

She first helped immigrant owners of small businesses in California. When she developed anxiety and depression, Kwiri realized how many people, like her, were struggling with their mental health — and LifeGyde was born.

Abi Ramanan

Abi is the co-founder and CEO of ImpactVision, a software platform that uses machine learning to reduce food waste.

ImpactVision’s technology uses digital imaging to take a picture of food and analyze its nutritional value and freshness. The system aims to reduce waste while also improving food safety. As technology advances, the sensors it uses are reducing in size and price, and could soon be integrated into everyday devices.

Oana Toiu

Oana is the founder and general manager of Social Innovation Solutions, which offers training and consultancy in social innovation.

She’s also on the Board of Directors of The Entrepreneurship Academy, where students work in teams, learning about business by running real businesses under the guidance of a team coach.

Doreen Kessy

Doreen is CEO of Ubongo, a multi-media educational platform in Africa. Using the power of entertainment and mass media, the company provides educational material at low cost and high volume.

Some 6.4 million households in 31 countries currently watch, listen and learn from Ubongo’s cartoons each week, with improved outcomes in maths and school readiness.

Over the years, when a book has spoken to me with particular power, I have put pen to paper and send word off to the author, communicating what their work meant to me.

It all started in my 18^th year, when I was entertaining my own imagination of success as a writer. I was full of high expectations, believing that becoming an author was simply a matter of putting my thoughts onto paper, sending the works to a publisher and waiting for fame to come. Then came the great disappointment. I wrote to famous children’s author Lloyd Alexander, describing my fruitless yearlong effort at publication and asking him for direction. To my joy, he answered:

“Advice is always very easy to give — but very hard to make it specific and meaningful, since we all have to work in our own ways. When you mention that you’ve been writing for a year without being published, I hasten to tell you that I wrote seven times that long without being published! So, perhaps one piece of advice is: Patience.”

I was encouraged by the idea that a well-regarded writer would take the time to offer a bit of advice to an overconfident teen. But Mr. Alexander was not a singular case. But when I did get one, the content was often filled with consideration and even, at times, affection.

I think of the American poet William Stafford, who replied tome from Lake Oswego, Oregon. We actually had an ongoing correspondence (通信) for a while. I wrote to him asking if he would be so kind as to autograph one of his books for me. His reply brought an immediate smile to my face: “I am eagerly ready to autograph and return a book — it makes me feel like an author.”

“We are here because of charcoal (木炭),” announced Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan at a conference in Dar es Salaam, as she unveiled ambitious new plans to boost clean energy use within the country by up to 90% over ten years.

According to new data, the total emissions(排放) from household food consumption account for the equivalent of 1.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. A household’s carbon footprint related to food consumption is largely driven by its cookstoves and fuels used for cooking. Along with Tanzania, one-third of the global population relies on biomass—wood, charcoal, or animal dung(粪便) for household cooking.

Burning charcoal and these other “dirty” cooking fuels indoors generates black powder, and household air pollution that is responsible for premature deaths and illnesses. In addition, women and children may spend up to 20 hours per week in collecting firewood and four hours per day cooking over traditional stoves—opportunity costs that may come at the expense of school attendance or work and hobby interests. The costs will only increase as forest degradation forces women and children farther afield to find firewood to cook and warm their homes.

These significant health and climate impacts of household cooking help explain the motivation for countries like Tanzania to come up with aggressive plans to stop using dirty cookstoves and fuels.

There are a wide variety of technological solutions and concerted donor campaigns to facilitate the switch to cleaner cooking, but the reality is that total investments in the clean cooking sector are still far short of the estimated $ 10 billion per year.

Barriers can and should be removed through thoughtful, context-specific policies. Leaders and policymakers in Sharm EI Sheikh should follow Tanzania’s example and commit to effective policies that will develop innovative and locally appropriate technologies and fuels, and secure long -term funding to ensure universal clean cooking access by 2030.

“This is the next revolution in flying,”says Mark Henning, European managing director of AutoFlight, a Chinese firm. Mr Henning is not alone in betting that electric vertical(垂直的)take-off and landing(eVTOL)aircraft have a bright future. The idea is that, being simpler, cheaper, greener and quieter than traditional helicopters, eVTOLs will be well suited to operate short-range passenger services across large urban areas, such as flying people between airports and city centres.

Now, Mr Henning is setting up an operation at Augsburg Airport in Germany to further the development of Prosperity I, the company’s air taxi. Prosperity I can seat three passengers and a pilot. It is a hybrid between a helicopter and a fixed-wing plane. It takes off and lands vertically, using multiple rotors(旋翼), but these are switched off when it is in full flight. At that point a “pusher” propeller(螺旋桨)at the back takes over, to provide forward drive, and thus lit via the wings. This arrangement makes better use of the aircraft’s battery, giving Prosperity I a range of some 250 km.

A model will be test-flown in Germany in order to obtain what is known as a type certificate from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency(EASA). This signifies the airworthiness of a new aircraft. Although AutoFlight is also seeking certification in China, the company thinks the addition of European approval will help speed the machine’s entry into service in other markets, too. It hopes to complete the approval process by 2025.

There is uncertainty about how the rules will differ from place to place. Nonetheless, enough regulatory progress has been made. In America, Joby Aviation hopes next year to become the first to obtain a type certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration(FAA). In Europe, Volocopter, a German firm, hopes to provide air-taxi services for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

It is not only new firms which are getting into the business. Airbus is developing ideas for eVTOLs. So is Boeing. With so much effort and money going into this new form of air travel, some of these birds will surely be flying soon.