Amika George

Amika is an activist who organised the successful Free Periods campaign that led to free sanitary products becoming available in schools. With an Indian heritage and brought up in London, she began campaigning at just 17 years old and by June 2021, aged 21, while studying Indian colonial history at Cambridge, she received an MBE for services to education. It was after reading a headline on the BBC website: ‘Girls Too Poor to Buy Sanitary Products Missing School’, that she started a petition to Westminster attracting more than 200,000 signatures and set up the not-for-profit Free Periods organisation in 2017. In collaboration with the Red Box Project, a similar campaigning organisation, Amika led a legal campaign against the UK government, to meet its obligations to ensure equal access to education for all children. She won a host of accolades for her Free Periods campaign including being named in Time’s Most Influential Teens of 2018 list, the Big Issue Top 100 Changemakers and Teen Vogue’s 21 under 21 list. Others include the Goalkeepers Campaigners award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In early 2022, Amika published her first book Make it Happen about how to get into politics from ground level.