2024 High School Winners

Yashila Yadav is in the 11th grade at Copenhagen International School in Copenhagen, Denmark. This was her first year entering the World of 8 Billion as well as the first time she had created a film on her own. She previously participated in the Climate Science Olympiad and enjoyed the challenge of finding solutions to climate issues. Yashila decided she wanted to continue using her voice to raise awareness about issues she is passionate about and found this contest while searching for more opportunities.

Yashila’s strong interest in health and medicine made it easy for her to decide to create a video in the health category. She recently spent time working with a United Nations youth organization where she contributed to raising awareness on global topics and supporting their events. One of the projects she worked on was about female genital mutilation (FGM), and Yashila decided she wanted to expand more on the theory and context behind this issue by creating a video about it. She was shocked to learn that over 230 million girls around the world are affected by FGM. The most challenging parts of creating her video were finding and narrowing down sources, allocating enough time to cover all the important facts, and balancing the workload with her International Baccalaureate (IB) classes and extracurricular activities.

Yashila enjoys playing in the Copenhagen badminton club and practicing chess, usually as a hobby but sometimes competitively when she has the time. One of her favorite subjects is biology, but she also finds neuroscience fascinating and would like to explore a career in neurosurgery. She looks up to her parents for inspiration, often comparing their similar paths of life, and is grateful to have them as role models. She plans to use her prize money towards the SATs and advises future contest participants to “summarize what’s important and write it down so you don’t go on and on about the definition, but instead talk about its causes and consequences to keep your video balanced.”