Habibti Family

Meet The KidBoss the UK’s First Ever Child CEO

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International Charity Penny Appeal, appoints 11 year old Shakira Rahman as the UK’s first ever Child CEO onto a charity board.

 

Shakira Rahman dubbed the KIDBOSS, is just 11 years old, but she will report directly to the CEO and have the chance to share her ideas at an executive level. This is a real kid, with a real role, with very real issues to tackle. Penny Appeal wants to empower Shakira with the support she needs, to make a real difference to the issues affecting children in the UK today.

She’s smart, funny and ferocious – and most importantly, she genuinely cares about her peers. From an orphan in the Gambia, to the kid down the road going to school hungry, she’s ready to advocate for them and she’s going to get heard.

Shakira will be visiting Penny Appeal’s projects to find out about the work they do as well as meeting with children from around the UK to discover what they want and need. Her first assignment was to visit orphan children in The Gambia and see how different or similar their lives are from hers. Her mission will be to raise awareness of the effect our world is having on children, because whether it’s poverty, Islamaphobia or domestic violence, children are often the worst affected.

Shakira says: “I’m so excited to be Penny Appeal’s Kid Boss! A lot of kids don’t have a voice, and it’s my job to make sure they get heard. Because we are the future of this country; of this world… now we just have to make grown-ups understand that!”

 

 

 

Shakira’s first assignment was to visit an orphan complex in The Gambia, where she could get a real sense of the work Penny Appeal is doing and the big difference it is making to orphan children’s lives.
She went to school for the day in Gambia and spend time playing and talking with the children, finding out how suprisingly similar their lives are. Here’s what Shakira said of the experience;

 “I was so excited to meet the children in The Gambia, when I got there I spent a couple of days with them hanging out. They have breakfast at school as well as lunch, because some children come from poor families. When I told Fatima (one of the students) that some schools have breakfast in my country because children are coming to school hungry, she couldn’t believe that we have poor people in our country.”

 

Penny Appeal’s  CEO Aamer Naeem OBE says: “As a child CEO, Shakira’s role is to make sure children’s issues are at the heart of Penny Appeal’s future and to bring a youthful perspective to our team. There is a negative correlation between experience and imagination and we are optimistic Shakira will bring a fresh young paradigm to the work we do whilst informing a renewed focus on the needs of children. ”

 

Go and support this ‘future leader’ and follow her journey on #KIDBOSSAMAZING 

 

 

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