$ 1 : 16
For every $1 of value invested, One Young World Ambassadors deliver $16 of social value, based on a Social Return on Investment analysis of 42 Ambassador-led initiatives addressing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2022
SDG Impact Tracker
Interested in supporting impactful initiatives led by young leaders? Search this database of over 350 projects from the One Young World Community to find out more.
Warmi STEM
Leticia is a chemical engineer by profession, and was the first woman of her indigenous community based in northern Ecuador to access higher education. During her time at university, she met mentors that inspired her to give back and share the knowledge she had gained. She founded Warmi STEM in 2019 to empower indigenous women and encourage their participation in STEM fields. Leticia was introduced to other indigenous women in 2020 through the Fundación Kichwa Institute of Science, Technology and Humanities (KISTH), of which she is also a co-founder, and they joined Warmi.
Leticia attended the One Young World Summit in Munich, 2021. She has since helped other young indigenous women from Ecuador participate in national and international events through her mentorship and advisory roles in the community. Leticia has advised other indigenous women applying for international scholarships, with her KISTH co-founder, One Young World Ambassador Janeth Bonilla, winning a scholarship to the Summit in Manchester, 2022, following her successful participation in another programme supported by Leticia.
Warmi STEM has worked to promote STEM fields by directly engaging over 200 students in four indigenous communities in person and another ten communities online. The organisation’s STEM workshop lasts for four hours and introduces participants to a broad range of science-based topics as well as the arts. The workshops are free, and students are only expected to bring food to share as part of the learning process, in keeping with Kichwa tradition and culture. In the future, Leticia aims to reach more communities and continue tackling the stigma around education for women in indigenous communities in Ecuador.
“My experience following the Summit motivated me to work even harder, and build up my team at Warmi STEM. Attending the Summit virtually made me conscious of how important in-person activities are, and it inspired me to continue my in-person activities with more communities. It also made me conscious of how important it is to look after yourself, mentally and physically as a young leader in order to keep working.”
Wasel for Awareness & Education
Wasel for Awareness & Education - Jordan
Lynn Malkawi
Ambassador-led Initiative
16
SROI
Lynn established Wasel for Awareness & Education in 2018 as a non-governmental organisation working on economic empowerment, social empowerment, and civic engagement in Jordan. The project began as a school programme with a focus on bringing young people of different backgrounds together to break stereotypes. Motivated by the youth unemployment rate in Jordan, which stands at around 40.3%, Lynn pivoted to creating entrepreneurship programmes and training to help facilitate the growth of the social enterprise sector in the country. Lynn is also the founder of Mehnaty, a company working to accelerate people’s career development through mentorship services.
Lynn attended the One Young World Summit in London, 2019, on an Enterprise for Peace Scholarship. She was motivated by the Delegate Speakers and their stories to think outside of the box, reach out to other Ambassadors, and learn how she could use those connections further down the line for collaborations. Lynn has maintained connections with the One Young World Community in Jordan.
Wasel for Awareness & Education has three main programmes. Shabbek wa Bader, their school programme, has impacted 462 students in 21 schools across 360 sessions, and has been instrumental in the launch of 15 social initiatives. It involves partnering students from private and public schools once a week to learn about Wasel’s methodology on community organising and project management. Shabbek wa Ibtaker, their entrepreneurship programme for young people, has so far held nine rounds spanning 366 sessions, and has resulted in 79 young people receiving grants or incubation opportunities to date. Wasel’s citizenship engagement programme has reached 1,401 participants and taught them about human rights, labour laws, and the Jordanian constitution, and has resulted in five policy papers written and published. These policy papers have been shared and discussed by policymakers within the country.
“The Summit impacted me because I got to meet many people that were extremely different to myself, it inspired me to think about the box. I’ve stayed in touch with many fellow Ambassadors with the possibility of collaborating and learning from each other, we have even tried applying for funding as a consortium.”
Matric Live
Kagisho co-founded Matric Live, an e-learning application for grades 10-12, in 2020 to provide underprivileged students from South Africa’s townships with educational support during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Matric Live emerged as a collaboration from Kagisho’s first project, CynC, and his co-founder Lesego’s own platform, as a hybrid to aggregate the educational resources they wished they had access to in their youth. Inequality in South Africa massively impacts the country’s education system. For every 100 learners, less than 50 pass the matric exam necessary to attend tertiary education, and only 14 make it to university.
Kagisho attended the One Young World Summit in Ottawa, 2016, which inspired him to take his first social enterprise, CynC, from an idea into a tangible product. He credits the One Young World Community in South Africa for helping to spread awareness of his work and extend his reach. He has also worked with fellow Ambassador Mandy Munchnick on her mental health platform, with the two collaborating on a campaign hosted on Matric Live for it.
Kagisho and his business partner decided to make Matric Live free during the first COVID-19 lockdown, and the platform quick;y grew to 630,000 users. As of 2022, the app has had over 1.1 million learners. The platform includes a learning component, and was the first to gain access to 57 government-approved study guides. It also includes a gamified learning component and exam simulations. Matric Live has partnered with South Africa’s Department of Basic Education, and has also launched learning tools for teachers, seeking to expand their reach to impact not only students.
“Had I not gone to the One Young World Summit in 2016, my project would have stayed an idea and MatricLive would not be what it is today. The Summit helped me do justice to my potential, I came back as a different man.”
Play Malawi
Play Malawi - Malawi
Gracian Mkandawire
Ambassador-led Initiative
15
SROI
Gracian was motivated by the impact that sports had on him as a young person to co-found Play Malawi in 2015. The organisation aims to educate young Malawians on sexual and reproductive health, and non-communicable diseases through the vehicle of sport. In Malawi, people under the age of 35 make up 80% of the population. Initially, Gracian’s efforts centred on table tennis due to his extensive personal experience with that sport, but Play Malawi has since expanded to include lawn tennis activities to teach more young people about health issues.
Gracian attended the One Young World Summit in London, 2019, on a scholarship from the Z Zurich Foundation. He made valuable connections with fellow Ambassadors working on similar projects in different parts of the world. He was able to visit another Ambassador’s organisation and learn about their model, part of which he adapted to use at Play Malawi. Following the Summit, and emboldened by his experience, Gracian successfully applied for a position working on sports development in the northern region of Malawi. Gracian continued to collaborate with Z Zurich Foundation after the Summit to scale his work further.
Play Malawi’s impact has grown steadily over the years, directly impacting 8,000 young people in primary schools across Malawi. In addition to organising tournaments and training, Play Malawi offers services such as HIV testing for those involved in their educational activities. In partnership with another NGO, Gracian and his team developed a manual combining approach of playing games and education. From his students, 15 young people have made it to Malawi’s national team for table tennis and lawn tennis over the past five years. Gracian’s work has helped diversify sports education in schools in the country.
“When I remember the Summit, the first thing that comes to my mind is the invaluable connections that I made with fellow Ambassadors that are doing projects similar to mine. I got to visit the organisation of one of them, based in London, and learn from their model for better practices to implement at Play Malawi. Those connections still continue.”
Wondr
Wondr was founded during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands by One Young World Ambassadors Flory Achammer and Emma Hoch, along with their colleagues Nina Hoedlmayr and Ella Adam. Based on the experiences of people, especially students, in isolation during the country’s lockdowns, the team looked to tackle loneliness and mental ill health by helping people connect and establish social interactions to build communities. Loneliness is increasingly a leading cause of mental health in Europe, with around 10% of people over 18 experiencing symptoms.
Flory and Emma attended the One Young World Summit in Munich, 2021, where they were able to interact and establish connections with fellow Delegates. Their experience meeting young leaders from different countries and backgrounds inspired and empowered them to continue expanding their initiative with Wondr. After the Summit, Emma managed to connect with another One Young World Ambassador in the Netherlands Community and they have since launched a different project together, Periodic.nl, to increase access to menstrual hygiene products in the country.
The first iteration of Wondr was Wondr Walks, in which people were introduced to each other based on location and shared interests, with the Wondr team providing conversation starters during socially-distanced walks over the course of four weeks. The Wondr team then pivoted their strategy to continue enabling human connections by developing the Wondr app, through which users get to know each other via engaging questions and activities. Wonder has so far directly impacted over 2,100 people, and the team have also launched a desktop version. They have also released their own podcast to help young professionals develop better communication skills in their leadership journeys.
“It's extremely empowering when you’re in the Summit and you're like okay, you're part of this. You can also do this. You're part of this community meaning you can do this. If there are so many people driving that change, I can drive this change as well.”
Young Farmers Champions Network
Young Farmers Champions Network - Uganda
Khamutima Tumwebaze
Ambassador-led Initiative
33
SROI
Khamutima is the founder and Executive Director of the Young Farmers Champions Network (YOFCHAN). The organisation was established in 2016 as a member-based non-profit organisation focused on representing the voices of mostly marginalised young people to engage in the agricultural sector profitably and sustainably. The mission of YOFCHAN is to equip young farmers with the knowledge, tools, and resources they need to start, grow, and scale their agribusinesses. This is achieved through advocating for an enabling environment for the engagement of young people in agriculture, capacity building in agronomy and agribusiness skills, creating linkages to financial support, and markets for the young farmers.
Khamutima attended the One Young World Summit in The Hague, 2018. He subsequently built a strong network in Uganda and in the East Africa region with fellow Ambassadors. Khamutima believes that such networks are instrumental for young entrepreneurs looking to make social impact. The One Young World Community in Uganda holds regular meetings where Ambassadors support each other with ideas on how to improve their work and discuss their experiences. After the Summit, Khamutima was shortlisted for opportunities through One Young World to support YOFCHAN’s development.
Through their Youth Champion Model, which inspires and encourages young people in Uganda to join agriculture as an attractive and profitable business, YOFCHAN have developed a network of 1,500 young farmers. These champions act as leaders of young farmers groups in their communities, receive financial advice, leadership, business management and agronomic training, and access to markets and common-user value addition facilities through YOFCHAN. These champions then take their knowledge and skills back to their communities and replicate YOFCHAN’s model locally. Through this method, YOFCHAN has indirectly impacted over 45,000 young farmers throughout Uganda.
“The contacts I made during the Summit, both from Uganda, East Africa and internationally, have been very helpful in terms of sharing ideas and being able to put those ideas into action to improve my work. In Uganda we have meetings often between the Ugandan One Young World Ambassadors to share our experiences, and these types of networks as an entrepreneur are very important.”
Akata Farms
Akata Farms - Grenada
Bevon Chadel Charles
Ambassador-led Initiative
8
SROI
Bevon is an agripreneur and founder of Akata Farms, a company that has focused on sustainable agriculture through tailored farm building in rural communities in Grenada since 2016. Though Akata Farms is a for-profit company, it has a non-profit branch that focuses on skills development in partnership with the government, providing education on crop development, climate change adaptation measures, and job opportunities. Akata Farms also harvests vegetables, fruits and spices through various agricultural systems, including hydroponics, greenhouses and traditional methods.
Bevon attended the One Young World Summit in Munich, 2021, where she built a global network that has given her recognition in Grenada and the Caribbean as a young leader. As a One Young World Ambassador, Bevon has encouraged ten young people from the Caribbean region to apply for One Young World Scholarships and other international programmes. As a result of her One Young World experience, Bevon has grown in her confidence as a young leader.
Akata Farms has built a network of over 1,500 farmers across the region with the goal of reducing Caribbean agricultural imports and food insecurity by developing agricultural alternatives for both local consumption and, eventually, exportation. The organisation has assisted ten farmers to successfully obtain grant funding, and has provided technical support to an additional five people to start their own farms. Through its production side, Akata Farms feeds over 10,000 households annually and sells its produce to supermarkets and hotels across Grenada. In 2023, Bevon and her team’s main goal is to create at least 10 new enterprises working on sustainable agriculture, employ 100 new people, and train an additional 100 on farming techniques.
“The exposure I’ve received since becoming a One Young World Ambassador has allowed me to position myself at the negotiation table and charge forward. One Young World has opened a lot of opportunities for me to be at that table.”
ACNA
Ruth founded the Association for Care Leavers Network in Africa (ACNA) in 2021 to develop a regional network for young people who have left care, motivated by her own experience as a care leaver. Care leavers are a marginalised group in society, with a lack of policies and programmes designed to support them. With this, they are left behind in terms of development. ACNA provides a platform for young care leavers to be heard, included, and advocate for their rights, while engaging with local and national governments to design policies and frameworks to support them, and decrease their vulnerability and marginalisation in society.
Ruth first attended the One Young World Summit in The Hague, 2018, and spoke on stage about the rights of children, the experience of care leavers in her region, and her advocacy work. Following the Summit, her activism gained national recognition, which allowed her to work with the Kenyan government and other stakeholders to create the National Care Reform Strategy. This strategy has been implemented and recognizes a child’s right to family.
Ruth aided her peers in Zimbabwe to create their own country-wide network which now has over 3,000 members advocating for policy change. ACNA is providing technical support for the development of Zimbabwe’s first Leaving Care Bill. In Ethiopia and Senegal, ACNA has 200 young care leavers involved in decision-making processes for policy changes. In Uganda, ACNA through the Care Leavers Network launched the Girls Glow programme to advocate for access to reproductive health services for girls in care. ACNA provides mentorship opportunities to help develop the leadership skills of its members. In total, ACNA is active in 11 African countries and has more than 6,000 members, and will be hosting its first African Conference of Care Experienced Youth in May 2023.
“Being part of the One Young World Community means having the master key to the doors you otherwise would not go through. No other forum for young people is not only visible but where young people including the most marginalised are supported as One Young World. Following my speech at the Summit, more than 60 media houses wanted to interview me. In advocacy, you need this because when you are visible, the decision makers lean in.’’
Leading Environmental Sustainability, Pfizer UK
Leading Environmental Sustainability, Pfizer UK - United Kingdom
Katie Cadge, Steph Barnes, Owen White
Business for Social Good
Pfizer One Young World Ambassadors continued to make an impact in the Sustainability Steering Committee in 2022, increasing the calibre and scale of the work under its three pillars of internal activation, governance, and external engagement. The initiative also welcomed two new Ambassadors into its ranks, Katie and Owen, following the Manchester 2022 Summit.
Following the success of its carbon footprint measurement reporting and the start of their employee engagement strategy in 2021, the team expanded the reach & impact of these efforts throughout 2022. They organised the One Pfizer, One Planet webinar for their colleagues, inviting Will Day, Fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), to speak about the climate crisis. Steph connected with Will Day through a One Young World event in London. Off the back of that webinar, the team expanded the Today Do This workshop series from two pilots in 2021 to an additional five events in 2022.
The committee also developed a compulsory One Pfizer, One Planet e-learning module following the success of the aforementioned webinar. The module provided information on the climate crisis, and also Pfizer’s Net Zero by 2040 goal and subgoals. They have successfully grown the ‘UK Sustainability Team’ Champions group, doubling its membership and setting the foundations for future activation for sustainability causes within Pfizer. The committee plans to enable the implementation of sustainability initiatives from the Champions group that align with Pfizer’s overarching sustainability strategy.
Pfizer UK hosts an annual National Conference for around 700 employees, and for the first time ever, included Net Zero on the event agenda, led by the Sustainability Steering Committee. Peter Collins, Director of Global Health & Social Impact at Pfizer, gave a speech demystifying Net Zero for Pfizer and the broader healthcare system. Steph then spoke about five actions that her Pfizer colleagues can take to positively impact sustainability within the company.
The steering committee has expanded their educational engagement to senior leadership, building two bespoke workshops, one for commercial leaders and the other for Pfizer UK’s medical directors. The team continues to quantify the company’s carbon footprint annually, in line with government regulations. Katie was selected as one of four UN SDG Young Innovators, a programme that involved equipping participants with the tools to create change and prioritising solutions to sustainability challenges. This has led to Pfizer UK joining the Sustainable Medicines Partnership as a Founding Collaborator.
In 2023 the team is seeking to apply a sustainability lens to some of Pfizer’s core business activities in the UK to really integrate the knowledge built up with colleagues over the last two years with their everyday business responsibilities.
“I was blown away by my first One Young World Summit experience at Manchester last year. The most impactful part for me was being surrounded by so many young leaders, all with diverse experiences but united by their drive to create change for the better. It was inspiring to hear first-hand how Ambassadors are delivering meaningful innovation across the SDGs, industries, and the globe - just the motivation we needed as a team to push our ambitions for 2023 and beyond!” - Katie Cadge
Fotolampara - Eviuz
Fotolampara - Eviuz - Colombia
German A. Mueses Rodriguez
Ambassador-led Initiative
8
SROI
Germán co-founded Eviuz in 2018 with Carlos Patiño and Jaqueline Rosero, and the company was born out of innovative projects from different university campuses in Pasto, Colombia. Its landmark initiative is the Fotolampara, which was developed to provide light to homes in vulnerable and hard to reach communities in the country. Colombia has 1,710 rural areas where more than 128,500 people only have access to electricity for four to twelve hours a day. Eviuz created a technology that uses photosynthetic activity and other vital processes in plants to obtain clean, sustainable, and sufficient power to address the challenges of energy access in Latin America and the Caribbean. Germán is a recipient of the Government of Colombia’s Premio Nacional al Talento Joven Award, through which he attended One Young World.
Germán attended the One Young World Summit in London, 2019. He credits this experience with introducing him to other One Young World Ambassadors and corporate partners engaged in the issue of clean, accessible energy and climate change. Through these connections, Germán has been able to redirect the focus of Eviuz and raise awareness of Latin America’s unique climate and the challenges it faces. Access to the One Young World Community has allowed Germán to develop his leadership skills.
Eviuz’s main product, the Fotolampara, is a flower pot with zinc and copper sheets that can be placed in a house to generate clean electricity. In rural areas, where houses are often covered with vegetation, this technology is more accessible than alternatives and saves households and users $30 of electricity costs monthly. As of 2023, Eviuz has installed 300 Fotolamparas. Each flower pot generates 120 kilowatts of electricity annually, impacting around 1,200 people. In 2022, in partnership with the Trackingmovil consortium, Eviuz created IO MIDO. This project integrates hardware and wireless software that is capable of wireless monitoring of any type of environmental parameter.
“Going to the Summit was a really positive experience for myself and for the development of my company. I was able to engage with global stakeholders in the fight against climate change, it has been a great alliance between continents. It opened my mind to how to lead in the future, and gave me information on leadership development that you don’t find anywhere else. It has also opened up funding opportunities for us.”
Wildlife Conservation Society
Wildlife Conservation Society - Laos
Manoly Sisavanh
Ambassador-led Initiative
29
SROI
Manoly’s role at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Laos PDR Program entails providing strategic policy guidance on protected areas and wildlife management and protection, and supervising cross-cutting programmes on counter wildlife trafficking and One Health. Her dream is to safeguard intact areas of vast natural significance for Laos and the wider world. Laos protected areas support the livelihoods of several million people of multi-ethnic groups, yet they are increasingly threatened by human-induced processes.
Before attending the Summit in London, Manoly visited Nam Et-Phou Louey (NEPL) National Park, home to many critically endangered species. Manoly heard many issues that rangers, who are responsible for protecting the area, face including basic lack of law enforcement mandates, equipment, and personnel to sufficiently and effectively protect over 400,000 hectares. These discussions inspired Manoly to apply for the Mary Robinson Climate Justice Award, for which she was successful and received £3,000 to help increase her conservation efforts. Manoly returned to Laos and continued to drive advocacy work for conservation, including contributing to the drafting of new and revised legislation on protected areas, CITES implementation, wetlands and wildlife and aquatic resources.
WCS, in collaboration with the NEPL National Park Management Office, currently works with 10 teams of rangers, made up of local community members and government-provided military personnel for forest patrolling. Many of the rangers were once farmers and hunters who contributed to the damage they are now employed to prevent. With the grant, Manoly has funded new equipment for the rangers, including technology for the SMART patrolling system, boots and badges. This helps them in their work tackling illegal hunters and loggers. Local communities of over 30,000 inhabitants are becoming better educated and equipped to support the conservation of their environment. The threats from agricultural expansion, free range cattle raising, illegal hunting and logging remain high, but with collaborative management between government, INGOs, and local communities, biodiversity monitoring shows promising trends in the protection of endangered species and ecosystems.
“The Mary Robinson Climate Justice Award helped a lot to lift the conservation issue’s profile in Laos. Seeing a young woman from Laos as one of the speakers at One Young World and as a winner of the award somehow inspires and empowers the youth to think that they too can do this!”
Mission Zero Plastic
Mission Zero Plastic - Nigeria
Gideon Olanrewaju
Ambassador-led Initiative
29
SROI
Mission Zero Plastic is an initiative begun by Gideon Olanrewaju in partnership with The Coca-Cola Foundation to simultaneously reduce plastic waste and build schools. Primary education is officially free in Nigeria but over 10 million children do not attend. Gideon is the founder and Chief Executive Director of Aid for Rural Education Access Initiative (AREAi), an organisation running multiple programmes including Education in Bottles, where plastic bottles are recovered, processed, and transformed into school infrastructure. Mission Zero Plastic is one project operating within this programme’s overarching framework, which in turn is only one programme within the AREAi umbrella. Gideon’s partnership with The Coca-Cola Foundation is focused on the recovery stage and has already accomplished much, while the transformation stage has not yet begun.
Gideon credits One Young World for helping to spur Mission Zero Plastic to new heights. They began by collecting plastic bottles and building small structures, but it was at the 2019 Summit that Gideon first heard James Quincy, CEO of Coca-Cola, discuss the problem of plastic. After making introductions, Gideon managed to secure a partnership with The Coca-Cola Foundation to scale the project. The Summit also renewed his sense of purpose and solidified his belief in the potential of private-sector partnerships. Since then, Mission Zero Plastic has organised 600 young people, executed 18 different outreaches and gathered 261 tonnes of plastic waste.
By placing 60 bins in strategic locations around the country, Mission Plastic Zero has successfully reached 600,000 people indirectly. It has reached another million through social media channels, radio, and community outreach. The project has also recruited 120 women as plastic waste collectors and provided them with personal protective equipment and guidance on financial literacy. Mission Zero Plastic has also collaborated extensively with state environmental agencies.
"The One Young Would Summit renewed the sense of purpose that I have and always had when it comes to social impact. It also solidified the belief I had in the potential of private partnerships. The Summit taught me that there is magic in numbers as well."
PowerUp
In BMW there is a regular internal accelerator programme, whereby employees participate in a 12-week course to identify new initiatives and solutions for a set topic. Once a year, this topic is “business for purpose”, and this was the beginning of Jacob and Sabrina's sustainability collaboration which also led to their participation in the One Young World Summit. At the Summit, the Ambassadors were given much-needed encouragement that they were on the right path. They exchanged knowledge with like-minded delegates on potential obstacles, gave a presentation at a BMW workshop on circular economy and participated in a workshop on battery second-life hosted by Audi that reiterated the potential for sustainable innovation in the automotive industry.
The two young employees come from different backgrounds within BMW, Sabrina working in financial planning, and Jacob an engineer and doctoral candidate. As a pair, they created and lead the PowerUp battery recycling initiative in BMW. Jacob’s initial idea for a sustainability solution was in the area of desalination, however, upon noticing the waste of highly valuable battery systems during the car development process he adapted his thinking to see how this could be leveraged to tackle the global energy crisis. With their shared expertise, Sabrina and Jacob were perfectly placed to develop this idea.
A team of volunteers within BMW, including engineers and project managers by trade, takes high-voltage batteries that are usually removed from prototypes and recycled, and repurposes them to provide energy access to under-resourced schools in low-income communities. PowerUp creates a powerful energy storage block out of six high-voltage batteries. These store solar power from the photovoltaic system on the roof and supply the school with 42 kWh per day of clean electricity. Not only does this address the issue of power outages and clean energy, but it supports education development due to vast energy savings made by the schools that can be redirected into resources for teaching.
The pilot programme in a school in Rosslyn, South Africa is already under construction. The PowerUp team hopes to expand using access from the MINI brand to new schools in need, to exponentially increase the initiative’s social impact.
“One Young World is a powerful community of change-makers. Each person we met at the Munich conference made it clear that we are the change, we have to be the change.”
“One Young World and their participants provide powerful insights and gave us ideas and hands-on solutions on how to scale our project.”
Pink Parliament
Pink Parliament is an initiative by ‘Life in Leggings: Caribbean Alliance Against Gender-based Violence’, an organisation founded by Ronelle King to challenge the pervasive discrimination and abuse faced by women in the region. Around 46% of women in the Caribbean have experienced at least one form of violence [1]. Life in Leggings was founded as an online campaign in 2016 to bring attention to the prevalence of this issue, before it transformed into an advocacy organisation. Pink Parliament developed as an offshoot aimed at inspiring young women to pursue careers in politics and develop their leadership skills in order to advocate for the rights of women and girls in decision-making spaces.
Ronelle travelled to the 2019 One Young World Summit in London. She found working alongside other One Young World Ambassadors extremely useful for providing her with drive and much-needed support. The assistance she received on the more technical aspects of her projects helped build her capacity in those areas, and her membership of the One Young World Community opened the door to collaboration with other young leaders from across the globe. Pink Parliament also provides participants with a network of young female leaders, educating them on the necessity of female political representation.
The project’s goal is to equip young women with the knowledge and capacity to one day succeed in political office so as to institutionalise more robust and inclusive decision-making processes in Barbados. Pink Parliament has partnered with the Women and Development Unit of the University of the West Indies, as well as Open Campus, on scholarships, internship opportunities, and content creation. The programme has so far trained 80 girls in Barbados, engaging with the High Commission of Canada for mentorship. Participants have been invited to both houses of parliament, witnessing political procedures and meeting with senior politicians including the Prime Minister.
“Working along with other One Young World Ambassadors has given me drive and much-needed support which is necessary for any young leader. They've provided capacity-building skill development by assisting me with the technical aspects of my projects and advocacies.”
PakVitae
Pakistan is predicted to experience acute water shortages in the coming decades, a consequence of both climate change and poor governance. Yet 21.7 million Pakistanis already lack access to clean water, and the situation is exacerbated by the presence of millions of Afghan refugees. While studying in Florida, Usama Tanveer was introduced to polymeric hollow fibre membranes and their revolutionary potential in water treatment processes. After sharing a prototype he built with some friends in Pakistan, the group set out to tackle this problem.
Usama attended the One Young World Summit in 2019 in London. The Summit was an important networking opportunity for him, and he was able to attend sessions he was interested in and engage with like-minded young people operating in the same space as himself. A number of these people were able to contribute to PakVitae remotely, thereby building its capacity to reach vulnerable communities and assist in their water needs. Usama has also received training from implementation specialists from the UN, The Gates Foundation, and others, which helped the project get traction. PakVitae operates a research and development lab in Singapore for one of its emerging subsidiaries, Everywater, through which the team hopes to generate global impact.
Since beginning operations in 2017, PakVitae has managed to impact upwards of 15,000 people. Its water filters are usable for up to eighteen months with proper care, and local communities are trained extensively on how to get the most out of them. After three months, PakVitae carries out periodic screenings of random sampling tests to ensure the filters are working properly. The patent of the technology used in these water filters was recently accepted in the United States and PakVitae is well on its way to scaling the impact of its work.
“The most important and pivotal thing I got out of the One Young World opportunity was making connections. I was able to attend a lot of the sessions I was interested in, experts who were talking about development and who had 20 plus years of experience. I also met people who were able to add value to PakVitae remotely.”
How to use to the SDG Tracker
Search for projects by the following case study categories:
- Ambassador-led Initiatives: qualitative and quantitative analysis of the social impact of projects which are led by young leaders in the Community.
- Business for Social Good: written case studies for initiatives ran by corporate partner organisations, led by young Ambassadors/employees.
- Leadership Stories: short biographies of Ambassadors who are growing into influential leaders for social good in some of the world’s largest companies.
- Covid Young Leaders Fund: detailed case studies of grant recipients from One Young World's 2020 funding opportunity for projects tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Lead2030: detailed case studies of the Lead2030 award winners and how their projects have generated impact from participating in the programme.