Laxmi Agarwal

Human rights activist Laxmi Agarwal was born in 1990 in New Delhi, India. At the age of fifteen, Agarwal was the victim of an acid attack after rejecting a marriage proposal. She had to undergo numerous surgeries over the course of seven years after the attack. Agarwal filed a Public Interest Litigation that led to an order to restrict the sale of acid, amendments to the Indian Penal Code to specifically address acid attacks, and the development of a universal compensation scheme for victims of these attacks.

Hawa Abdi

Dr. Hawa Abdi was born in 1947 in Mogadishu, Somalia. In 1983, Dr. Abdi opened a clinic on her family’s ancestral land to provide free healthcare.After civil war broke out in 1991, she began housing the employees, as well as their friends and family on this land, and it ultimately became home to 90,000 people who were displaced by the war.Dr. Abdi’s one-room clinic grew overtime into a 400-bed hospital seeing more than 500 patients a day. The land also houses a school for 800 students.When militants attacked the village in 2010, demanding that Dr. Abdi hand over control of the hospital and surrounding land, she refused. Not only did she not back down, but she was released in a matter of days and got a formal apology from the militants. Two years later, Dr. Abdi was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr. Hawa Abdi passed away in 2020 at the age of 73.