Showing that you’re never too young to make a difference, these incredible girls and young women each saw a problem and went about fixing it.
I was delighted to come across a blog on The Female Lead’s s website: 6 incredible young women are solving real-life issues. Each of them identified an issue in their community and went about solving it – their problem-solving skills, creativity, motivation and drive is truly inspiring!
We also wanted to shine the spotlight on their stories and perhaps you can share them with your students to inspire them to take action when they come across a challenge!
Maegha Ramanathan
Maegha Ramanthan was just 13 when she founded Girls4Sports, which has become the world’s largest youth-led organisation fighting gender inequality in sports.
Describing their work, Maegha explains:
“At Girls4Sports, we’re not waiting for a seat at the table. We’re creating space for every girl to lead. We don’t just train athletes. We build changemakers – girls who speak up, organize, and lead in their communities and beyond.”
Maegaha has always loved sport and used this passion to join a ‘year-long competition team’. She practised for 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, working to continuously improve her PB even by a millisecond. However, she started receiving sexist comments from the male athletes on her team about needing to improve her ‘weak mindset’ and ‘build more muscle’ to be ‘as good as’ a male athlete. It really knocked her confidence and she found, from confiding in her female team mates, that she wasn’t alone in this experience. They too were facing sexism.
At this moment, Maegha realised that the issue was wide-spread and wanted to do something about it, so she founded Girls4Sport to focus on challenging stereotypes, encouraging more girls to enjoy and be confident in sport and providing more opportunities for girls to take part in sports. Girls4Sports also led the world’s first youth-led global women in sports conference.
Jayashruthi Palanisamy
As part of a HSC Design and Technology course, 16-year-old Jayashruthi Palanisamy chose to design something that would make communication more inclusive. Jayashruthi designed and developed a wearable sign language glove, the Echo Glove. It:
- translates hand gestures into speech
- converts spoken responses back into text (displayed on a screen attached to the glove)
- uses flex and movement sensors to detect signs
- has a facial expression analysis system that adjusts tone and emotion in real time, creating more natural conversations.
Whilst there are tools to support with communication for those who are deaf or have a hearing impairment, she found that these tools are expensive, bulky and restrictive (for example can only complete pre-set phrases). So she developed a glove that was portable, affordable and intuitive so it adapts as the conversation goes on, making it a more flexible and practical solution.
Rebecca Young
Determined to help the homeless, Rebecca Young had her first flash of inspiration at 12-years-old during her engineering club. She thought about how those living on the streets would struggle with how cold Glasgow (her local area) can be at night, so she designed something that could help keep them warm: a solar powered blanket. Her design was entered into the UK Primary Engineer competition, amongst 70,000 entries, aimed at addressing a social issue. Then Thales, an engineering company, used Rebecca’s design to create a working prototype and 35 of the blankets were given to Homeless Project Scotland to use in Glasgow. She gives this advice for any other girls who are interested in STEM: “If you have an idea like I did, then join clubs and talk to people about it, it helps.”
Vinisha Umashankar
At age 14, on her way home from school, Vinisha Umashankar noticed an ironing vendor throwing charcoal in the rubbish. Interested in science and innovation, with a passion for understanding how things work, her curiosity was piqued. She started looking into the impacts of charcoal and found it can increase the risk of lung disease for ironing cart vendors, and, alongside this, that the creation of charcoal was causing significant deforestation. Wanting to tackle these issues, she designed an alternative: a solar powered cart. This clean energy vehicle can use five hours of sunshine to power the iron for six hours. Plus, a cleaner, more sustainable cart means they can sell on doorsteps too, improving mobility.
She plans to manufacture and sell her cart at an affordable price in India and has plans to later export it to Africa and other countries in Asia. Vinisha addressed world leaders at COP26 to call for change to create a regenerative plant – an address that went viral.
Georgia
At 8-years-old, Georgia was out shopping with her mum for some new school trousers and was struck by an inequality – the girls’ trousers had no pockets but the boys’ trousers did.
“They didn’t have real pockets; they just had fake ones. And then we went in the boys’ and they had pockets and I thought it was unfair, so I bought boys’ trousers.” – Georgia
Frustrated, she took it upon herself to write to Sainsburys about the issue, explaining, “Girls need to carry things too! When will this change?” She received a letter thanking her for her feedback, where the writer said girls’ trousers should have pockets and that the feedback would be passed on.
This wasn’t enough for Georgia, who also started a petition that 56 children at her school signed. The supermarket didn’t reply to her petition and haven’t said if Georgia’s campaign had any influence, but Georgia did notice that when she returned to the store a year later, the girls’ trousers had pockets.
Millie
At 11-years-old, Millie’s innovation was born from her own struggles. Her dyslexia was making reading difficult and really uncomfortable for her. Her mum mentioned that Millie had “really horrendous headaches, sickness, worlds constantly moving around.” Millie wanted to be able to read more easily and comfortably and so designed a pair of colour-changing glasses to help with this.
Like Rebecca, her design was entered into a Primary Engineer competition, where she won a gold medal. Her design was also made into a prototype by Thales which is now seeking funding to ‘get the product onto the shelves’. On the design, a graduate mechanical engineer at Thales explains:
“I think it’s a really innovative idea. It’s something a lot of people have not thought of before and it’s a real-world problem. It’s been able to address something that’s so common with people, that people just tend to overlook a little bit.”
References
- The Female Lead (2026) ‘6 schoolgirls solving real-life issues’. Available at: https://community.thefemalelead.com/p/6-schoolgirls-solving-real-life-issues. (Accessed: 13 April 2026)
- Girls4Sports (2026) ‘Change the game, one girl at a time’. Available at: https://www.girls4sportsequality.org/ (Accessed: 13 April 2026)
- Girls4Sports (2026) ‘About: Executive Board’. Available at: https://www.girls4sportsequality.org/about (Accessed: 13 April 2026)
- The Next Gen Awards (2025) ‘Young Innovator of the Year Finalist: Jayashruthi Palanisamy’. Available at: https://www.nextgenoftheyear.com/finalists/jayashruthi-palanisamy (Accessed: 13 April 2026)
- Geddes, J. (2026) ‘Pupil who invented device to help homeless named ‘girl of the year’. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wyv1r0yjeo (Accessed: 13 April 2026)
- The EarthShot Prize (2026) ‘Clean Our Air 2021 Finalist: Vinisha Umashankar’. Available at: https://earthshotprize.org/winners-finalists/vinisha-umashankar/ (Accessed: 13 April 2026)
- Parker, B. (2025) ‘Girl claims victory in trouser pockets battle’. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgenyjgy9leo (Accessed: 13 April 2026)
- Fry, I. and Hirst, L. (2026) ‘Girl designs glasses to help others with dyslexia’. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy7j33rny16o (Accessed: 13 April 2026)
