Student Remarks, Child Protection Certificate Graduation Ceremony @ Harvard

Remarks prepared for the Child Protection Certificate Graduate Ceremony on May 11, 2026. Thanks to the FXB Center for Health & Human Rights for the opportunity.

Small Devotions

India has close to half a million children who grow up in children’s group homes, and for several years, it was my job to help the founders of these orphanages problem-solve their daily fires.

At the end of a particularly difficult week, I sat down with a retired schoolteacher who ran a home for 45 children in Bangalore. During Covid, he had lost more than 90% of his funding and ended up pledging his house for a personal loan to keep the lights on. He looked at me and he said: “What else could I have done, Akshay? I did all that I could think of.” When I pointed out that he could have closed, and nobody would have judged him for it, he said: “I thought about it. And I decided to keep the doors open just one more day, and I did this every single day for two years.”

To stop asking if you are the right person to do something. To commit to the work. To show up. This is devotion. And I believe that these small acts of devotion make the world go round.

That same devotion is what makes the Child Protection Certificate Program special, because you see it in all the conversations we have with our seminar series. I think back to Amanat Boparai talking about what it means to navigate trust and safety inside a large tech company with different incentives; Elizabeth Donger on both the opportunities and the very real limits of international law in keeping children safe from climate harm; Jasminko Hallovic on what it means to make ethical art from difficult experience. None of them shied away from complexity or conflict. They saw the cracks in the system, and they kept working anyway, every single day, in imperfect conditions with deeply uncertain information. What brought them all together was this devotion with which they treated child wellbeing as the central animating question of their work.

And what makes these big bold gestures of devotion to children possible is also how we show up for each other every single day. A friend from the Child Protection program, who has now graduated many months ago, sends me a message every few weeks that often goes like this: “I saw this opportunity, and I thought you would be great for it. You should apply.” Another started the Child Protection Caucus at the Kennedy School because she believed we needed more spaces that centred children at Harvard. Prof. Bhabha asks hard hitting questions of our speakers because she respects their time, and she values how much we learn from them. Rebecca and Claire send tons of reminder messages and follow emails because they want to hold every event with the seriousness it deserves. All small acts of devotion: unrequited, often exhausting, but deeply meaningful.

To be devoted is to chip away. To be devoted in small ways, every single day, is to chip away at the world we want to build.

We are all leaving this program to address lead poisoning in the Global South, maternal and child health in rural America, and for me, violence against children everywhere. None of these problems have received the devotion they need. None of them. That is where we come in.

We have all been taught to dream bigger. But this is a reminder that people will remember how we show up, every day, to make their world go round.

I am so proud of you and the community we’ve built. I promise to care deeply about the ideas you bring to the world. I promise to tell you kindly when I disagree. And above all, I promise to be devoted to all children, wherever they are.