260 million children around the world don’t have access to quality education. Theirworld, a global children’s charity committed to solving the global education crisis, identified the Transforming Education Summit at the 2022 United Nations General Assembly as a critical moment to get global policymakers to act.

While world leaders were the primary target, it was also critical to build awareness among the media and general public in the lead-up to the event, so they could pressure their respective leaders to act.

The goal was to make the needs of these children apparent in a way they could not ignore, by bringing them face-to-face, so that the children could directly make their demand: “let me learn.” But how could we do that with kids who were thousands of miles away?

People are more inclined to help when they personally know the person suffering. With this insight, we set out to bring some of the 260 million children without access to education face-to-face with world leaders so that they could get to know them a bit better. It’s why we launched the #LetMeLearn campaign where children would explain why they are not in school, demand that world leaders let them learn, and then make sure they know the power is in their hands.

Because these children were thousands of miles away, barely spoke English, and in many cases find it hard to speak up for themselves, we had to get creative and use AI for good. Helping real kids call out dozens of world leaders by name and making sure they left a lasting impact before they would vote on how much money they would pledge to the cause.

Theirworld has always believed that every child deserves the best start in life. The fact that 90% of a child’s brain development takes place between birth and the age of five and that more than one out of every two children will lack the most basic skills by 2030 are eye-opening statistics.

But looking beyond the data, we were more struck by the feelings & emotions of these children themselves. In speaking with Theirworld’s Youth Ambassadors, it was clear that these children want to learn. They genuinely want the opportunity to grow, yet most of them have no voice to be heard or recognized - whether in their local communities or on the world stage at large. We needed to give them a voice and give them a rallying cry, LetMeLearn. We wanted to not just make the data impossible to ignore, but make the children’s voices impossible to ignore.

In the months leading up to the UNGA, Theirworld launched the #LetMeLearn campaign featuring children from all over the world demanding change. It started with young people sharing their own unique stories about the shortfalls of education on social.

Then, to make sure world leaders attending the UNGA would hear these demands we wanted to bring some of these kids face-to-face so they could simply ask them to #LetMeLearn. Because many of them were thousands of miles away, and barely spoke English we worked with local NGOs in Beirut and Durban, to document their own stories using neural networks, language processing and deepfake technology so that we could tag dozens of world leaders in videos that directly called them out by name.

On the eve of the UNGA we installed holograms of our children over the NYC skyline so world leaders could come face-to-face with the children demanding change.

#LetMeLearn became a rallying cry with hundreds of thousands lending their voices to the cause and gaining 2 Billion impressions. Even the United Nations & UNICEF joined the movement and used #LetMeLearn as a direct message in their campaign demanding urgent action. Finally our message was brought to the UN floor in a powerful speech by Gordon Brown, the former UK Prime Minister who directly called out the millions of people behind our message only minutes before world leaders decided how much they would pledge to the cause.

The pressure was on at the UNGA for leaders to implement impactful change, and thankfully they did, agreeing to launch the first ever International Finance Facility for Education. This innovative funding vehicle decided to pledge $2 billion toward the most acute shortfalls in lower-and-middle-income countries in 2023 and will swell to $10 billion to cover the rest of the world by 2030.