Priscillia Afolabi Adesina spent much of her childhood quiet on the outside and anything but quiet within. “I used to dream entire possibilities in my head, without being able to say it outside,” she remembers. Today, the 19-year-old international relations student is the Grand Prize Winner of the New Voters x ChallengeUS Future Leaders Competition, using her voice to speak for the young people who are still learning to find theirs.

Priscillia spent her entire life in Nigeria before university, growing up in Abuja in a single-parent household with her mother and siblings. It was a childhood of adjusting and picking things up as they came, and of learning where young people were expected to stand. “If you’re young, you’re young, and that’s just the box that you’re put in,” she explains. “You have to wait till you’re older to do a lot of things, and so it’s a waiting process, literally.”

She waited by observing. A shy and quiet child, Priscillia found it difficult to speak to people, so she wrote instead, filling books with the thoughts she could not say aloud. “I was kind of the shy and quiet kid, but I always had something to write,” she says. 

That quiet child eventually decided she wanted to be someone who could speak. Priscillia now studies international relations in Istanbul, where she has lived for three years and is in her fourth year, set to graduate next year. She began university at 16. International relations was not a path she had planned, she admits, but she chose it because “it was who [she] wanted to be,” someone who could speak. Now she is often told she sounds like she is giving a TED talk, and people who knew her as a child are stunned. What matters to her, however, is that she did not wait for confidence to arrive. “I’m actually not waiting to feel confident enough,” she says, “but just going out there and just trying to put my voice out there.” 

Her ambitions are larger. She hopes to become a diplomat, an ambassador, or simply a voice “that can actually make something happen.” She has learned that speaking alone is not enough. “You have to actually translate that into action,” she says, building “structures that will last for the next generation.”

When asked about her greatest accomplishment, she points first to resilience: “my ability to say, okay, it’s bad, and I still want to stand up and try again.” Among her recent achievements is being named one of six winners of the 2026 UN Geneva Beyonds Challenge, chosen from about 600 submissions with a piece of poetry. At 19, she found herself alongside winners who were older and more advanced, and she is proud to have earned a place among them. 

What she values most is human connection, and what she calls “the nobleness of the human spirit,” a phrase she draws from a Maya Angelou poem. She sees it in an ambulance racing to a hospital as cars {People} part to make way for it. She saw it on a train when she rose to give up her seat for a pregnant woman and an entire row of people stood at the same moment to do the same. “It was beautiful to see,” she says. “I know we can be wonderful, terrible human beings sometimes, but I think there is something innately beautiful about us.”

That belief in human possibility is also why she believes young voices deserve to be heard. “We are very much capable of dreaming new realities,” she says. Some people might question that, but she calls it “the most beautiful thing in a world of growing AI.” Older generations, she says, tend to be fixed on how things have always been done, while young people “can envision new paths.”

She pushes back on the idea that only age can prepare someone to contribute. Growing up in West Africa, she often heard an adage from older people: “what an elder can see while sitting down, a young person would not see even from the top of a tree.” She respects the experience behind it but rejects its conclusion. “The adage speaks to something which I don’t agree with,” she says, that a young person could try their best and still not see what the elder sees, yet it doesn’t make what they see inferior. She encountered the same attitude in practice, finding applications, courses, and programs closed to her because she was not yet 18. When she entered university at just 16, she had to submit documents and explain why she was there so early. “I just truly believe that age is not a defining factor of what somebody has upstairs,” she says. “Why am I not ready? Because I’m 16? Even regardless of passing the prerequisite exams?”

Confidence, she says, is not the same as feeling ready. Every time she speaks, her hands shake, and she finds herself out of breath, though most people never notice. “99% of the time, I am literally shaking in my boots,” she admits. What changed was that she grew tired of being the quiet kid. She watched others speak confidently, sometimes saying questionable things boldly, and she asked herself why she was so afraid. “Sometimes you don’t have to be ready,” she says. “You just go on the stage and do it, scared and shaking.” Being the youngest in the room can still be intimidating, she says, but she reminds herself that the conversation is human to human. “There is no age boundary. If I have insight on this matter, I say it. If you have insight, you tell me.” Often, partway through a conversation, the fear simply fades.

Thinking about the challenges young people face also changed how she sees herself. Most of those challenges, she realized, come from within: battling your own mindset and the structures society has taught you to follow. Today she looks at her younger self “with love and care and support.” The girl who once walked looking at her shoes, she says, is proof “that new roads can be walked on. New paths can be paved.”

That is the message she most hopes young people take from her speech. “You are capable of seeing new realities, of envisioning things,” she says. “It’s not a bad thing to be able to see things differently. It’s actually beautiful.”

For a girl who once waited quietly inside her own head, Priscillia Afolabi Adesina now speaks with a clarity that has reached judges, an international stage, and young people far beyond Abuja.

See her contest-winning submission here.