Kailash Satyarthi, Anti-Slavery and Children’s Rights Leader, 2014 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Kailash Satyarthi is an Indian children’s rights and education advocate and an activist against child labour. In 1980 he gave up his career as an engineer to work on freeing child slaves. He founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (lit. Save the Childhood Movement) and has acted to protect the rights of more than 83,000 children from 144 countries.

He was the founder of Goodweave, also known as Rugmark, a voluntary labelling system that certifies rugs as being made without the use of child labor in South Asia. He has raised awareness of child labor as a human rights issue across the globe, and its relation to the perpetuation of poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment across the globe.

In 2014, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan.