The Kectil Program held its August 2017 Global Youth Leadership Conference on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. That week was the first Developing Country Youth Leaders gathering: youth leaders who had studied together online met in person on a campus known for international work in human rights, health, technology, and the law.
Emory University, a private university founded in 1836, was chosen as host because Atlanta could receive colleagues from many regions and because the campus already treated world affairs as ordinary work. Around the years of that gathering, Emory’s global efforts included the Carter Center, the Center for AIDS Research, the Center for Global Safe Water, the Halle Institute for Global Learning, the Emory Vaccine Center, and the Lillian Carter Center for Global Health and Social Responsibility. CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, taught neurosurgery at Emory Medical School. Emtricitabine (FTC), later included in widely prescribed HIV medicines, was invented on that campus.
Later Atlanta-area weeks moved to Georgia Tech. Regional conferences followed in Kenya, Ghana, India, and Southeast Asia. The ideas of that first week still hold: learn together, then take the work home. The 2027 program year continues on this site.