“Young people are not the leaders of tomorrow, we are today’s catalysts of change.”

That’s a statement from Rutherford’s Kupakwashe Mantangira.

The 21-year-old is set to stay true to those words when she represents Australian women at a United Nations Convention in March. 

“Many people when they think about young individuals they always see them as the future whether they’re the future leaders or decision makers but very few people recognise our capacity to impact change today,” she continued.

“We’ve seen it on the grand scale with the likes of Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg but I want to send a message that young people within our local communities are reservoirs of knowledge and we deserve a seat at the table and we must be consulted on all issues that affect us.”

In 2020, Kupakwashe worked as a child rights practitioner with Save the Children across rural NSW.

She interacted with young people who had faced the difficulties that came with the Black Summer fires, floods and COVID-19. 

Many of the people she worked with were young women who wanted to have a say in their community. 

According to Kupakwashe, “COVID-19 has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities and stalled progress on gender equality”. 

As one of a handful of United Nations youth delegates, Kupakwashe will be an Australian voice at this year’s Status of Women convention in New York. 

She’s also been tasked with writing a policy paper on how to embed the voices of women and girls into decision-making and will meet with some of Australia’s key policymakers to further these objectives through creating youth advisory councils.

How she got involved with the UN is pretty simple – she was accepted into a global voices fellowship and was named as the Freya Philips National Scholar.

Since she was just 14 Kupakwashe has been on an advocacy journey to help change the world. 

“It was a little bit of a mistake at the beginning,” she explained.

“I started off in model United Nations and I applied for a competition called Voice which is a public speaking competition where you write solutions to some of the world’s most challenging issues.

“I found out about the competition through my school teacher and it was about a week before the deadline so I just signed up.

“I was in year 8 and every lunch time I went to the library and I wrote down my speech and through doing so and presenting my speech at the competition, which I later won, I found my voice.

“It gave me a lot of strength to be an advocate and continue on this path.”

To put it simply, Kupakwashe believes “the world needs change and more voices”.

The former Hunter Christian School student is now studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of NSW (UNSW). 

“I was initially studying Law and International Relations but then I realised that I wanted to get a deeper understanding of how the world works,” she said.

“I have always been interested in advocacy and policy but I just felt like I needed a better understanding of the foundations of the world that we live in now and how it came to be as well as my place in it before I could make that change in the policy and the legal field.”

Kupakwashe will join the UN in New York on 13 March.

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