Kate Roberts (YouthAIDS)

Kate Roberts is a British human rights advocate and humanitarian. She works on a global scale to develop programs and services which target malaria, child survival, HIV/AIDS, gender equality, reproductive health, and non-communicable disease. She is best known as the founder of YouthAIDS and Five & Alive, subsidiaries of Population Services International (PSI), where she serves as vice president of corporate marketing and communications.

Kate Roberts, Jimmy Wales & Mark Zuckerberg (2009)

Early career

Roberts is originally from Southport, Merseyside in the United Kingdom, where she graduated from Southport College with a City and Guilds in Hotel and Catering Management. She started her career with the hotel group, Relais et Chateau. She speaks five languages including Russian, Dutch, and Romanian. She is also an accomplished contemporary artist and interior designer.

In the early 1990s, Roberts moved to Moscow, where she worked on launching the Russian version of Cosmopolitan Magazine, before moving into work in advertising and marketing with Saatchi & Saatchi.[1] Her work then took her to Romania where she created this country's first HIV/AIDS prevention marketing campaign that, Roberts said, "increased condom use by 100 percent in the first year". On holiday in South Africa she became aware of the scale of mortality being caused by the disease AIDS in the country and realised that the work and strategies she had put in place in her Romanian campaign could be applied to the rest of the world. This led her to create the YouthAIDS campaign in 2001.[2]

Programming development
YouthAIDS

Kate Roberts founded YouthAIDS in 2001 as an educational and prevention campaign for the charity Population Services International (PSI).[2] YouthAIDS is based in Washington, DC, while being active in around 70 countries.[3]

Five & Alive

After the success of YouthAIDS Roberts started another PSI campaign, Five & Alive, in order to raise money for and awareness of PSI projects to tackle preventable disease in children under five years old.[4]

References
  1. The Washington Post: A Consuming Cause, Population Services International (2004), retrieved on 20 November 2007
  2. CNN Heroes: Fighting AIDS with Ashley Judd, CNN International (2007), retrieved on 8 November 2007
  3. Keynote Speech: Kate Roberts, YouthAIDS Archived 2007-10-31 at the Wayback Machine, GW Center for the Study of Globalization (30 September 2004), retrieved on 20 November 2007
  4. Bio for Kate Roberts Archived 2010-01-19 at the Wayback Machine, Population Services International, retrieved on 8 November 2007
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