Winners of 2025 Zayed Prize for Human Fraternity announced

By Joseph Tulloch – Abu Dhabi

The winners of the Zayed Award for Human Fraternity in 2025 will be the NGO World Central Kitchen, the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, and 15 year-old Ethiopian-American inventor Heman Bekele.

The prize will be awarded on Tuesday 4th February, the UN-recognised International Day of Human Fraternity, at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi.

The award was established in 2019, following the signing of a joint Document on Human Fraternity by Pope Francis and Ahmed el-Tayyeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar.

The prize, now in its sixth year, is awarded annually to individuals or groups from anywhere in the world who work “selflessly and tirelessly to bridge divides and create real human connection”.

This year's Zayed Prize winners are announced at a press conference in Abu Dhabi

The honourees

This year, the relief organization World Central Kitchen will be recognised for its work providing food aid to communities suffering from humanitarian crises. Since its founding in 2010, the organisation has provided over 300 million meals across 30 different countries – including 100 million meals to Palestinians in Gaza since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023.

Mia Mottley, meanwhile, will be recognised for the decisive action she has taken on climate change as Barbados’ Prime Minister. In 2022, she launched the Bridgetown Initiative, a call for “urgent and decisive action to reform international financial architecture” to factor in climate considerations. She has also committed Barbados to achieving 100% renewable energy by 2030.

The final prizewinner will be Heman Bekele, a fifteen-year-old Ethiopian-American inventor who has developed a cost-effective soap designed to prevent and treat early-stage skin cancer. The product is currently being trialled at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US.

Heman Bekele, one of the 2025 Zayed Prize honourees

‘Envoys of peace’

The prizewinners are selected by an independent jury, whose composition varies from year to year. Among its members, there is always an individual selected by the Pope, an individual selected by the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, and an individual selected by the Secretary General of the Union Nations.

Two members of the jury – Baroness Patricia Scotland, the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, and Judge Mohammad Abdelsalam, Secretary-General of the Human Fraternity award – were present at the press conference in Abu Dhabi on Friday when the winners were announced.

Baroness Scotland told journalists that selecting the winners had been “excruciatingly difficult” given the quality of the nominees. The eventual honourees, she said, had been chosen because they were “beacons of light and hope, and true examples of human fraternity”.  

Judge Abdelsalam, for his part, told journalists that this year’s honorees would be not just “new ambassadors for human fraternity” but also “new envoys for peace, and makers of hope, of which we are in such dire need”.