Since 2018, when she attended the One Young World Summit in The Hague, Andrea has been part of a team leading a pilot project on recycling for Coca-Cola in Ica, Peru. Andrea and the group of young leaders have installed PET bottle collection bins at shops throughout the city. These collection points serve the community in three ways; they create recycling opportunities and awareness amongst consumers, allow for the reduction of CO2 emissions through the reuse of materials and provide formal employment for waste collectors.

The collection bins make recycling of PET bottles easily accessible for consumers. To further increase the attractiveness of recycling, prize draws are run for those who return their bottles in these bins. In doing so the pilot makes recycling more fun and attractive. The PET materials are picked up by waste collectors once a week. Through an app, collectors connect to those involved with the incentive. 50 collectors have secured employment in this manner collecting 3 times more than a regular collection point. This adds to the primary positive environmental outcome, that the collection of these bottles serves the purpose of recycling. 

Another key feature in this project are alliances between Coca-Cola, government and civil society. Local authorities are supporting it as a partner. The team aims to scale up from this pilot to a nationwide programme and in doing so, hopes to contribute to awareness amongst consumers and a world without waste.
 

Rosario is the producer and host of the podcast ‘Prix Pictet: A lens on sustainability’ where they ask: can photography save us from ourselves? She founded the project as a spin-off of the Prix Pictet due to the lack of awareness of the role that photography plays in sustainability outside of industry circles. 

As part of her role as Corporate Communications Officer, Rosario is part of the team that manages the Prix Pictet, the leading global award on photography and sustainability. Her podcast spreads the message of the prize to a wider audience, outside the fine arts community. It aims to draw global attention to issues of sustainability through the medium, interviewing prestigious thinkers such as war photographer Don McCullin, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, Editor of GQ UK Dylan Jones, and Curator of Photography at the MET Jeff Rosenheim, among others. 

In the first series, Rosario addressed the topics of hope, conflict, consumption, and displacement. They have reached well over 2,000 individual listeners primarily based in France, Switzerland, UK, and the USA. One of these listeners, inspired by the podcast, invited Rosario to speak at the TEDxHultLondon event, widening her audience even more.

Her podcast was recently renewed for a second series, which will be aired in 2020, wherein Rosario aims to widen the scope of the topics and their reach. The One Young World Summit inspired her to broaden her scope and ambitions, and to tap into the inspirational Community of young leaders with experience and expertise on the issues she hopes to address.

Carolina started working for AB InBev in 2017, taking the role of Sustainability Lead and then Manager in Colombia at the time of a new sustainable direction for the company. 

As a result, Carolina launched a project in the High Andean Wetlands, on which 70% of Colombia is reliant for water. The area is extremely vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. Carolina sought to address this with a conservation initiative in Santurban, a High Andean Wetland that provides water to more than 2 million people and is critically endangered. The project promotes voluntary agreements with local farmers to do forest restoration, preservation and sustainable agriculture in the buffer zone of the High Andean Wetland, the zone where the ecosystems suffer more pressures due to unsustainable productive activities.  The pilot programme was launched in 2018. The project has worked alongside farmers to improve their livelihoods and ensure local ownership simultaneously. The programme was launched in full as of 2019 when it became one of the key initiatives led by the company with an investment of nearly $1 million to scale up its ambition. Currently the project has impacted 9 municipalities, protected 3,700+ hectares and benefited more than 590 farmers.   

To ensure the longevity of the High Andean Wetlands project, the team designed and launched a new water brand called Zalva, the first purposeful brand in AB InBev’s portfolio in Colombia.  The brand has committed to invest most of its revenue to High Andean Wetland protection, initially funding this project in Santurban and then investing in other High Andean Wetlands in the country. This has ensured the project’s long term sustainability and scale. Aligned with the sustainability commitments of the project, this water was the first to be sold in 100% recycled PET bottles and will transition to more sustainable packaging such as returnable glass. The success of this project has led to the demand for its replication in eight more high risk watersheds across Latin America in Carolina’s new role as Sustainability Manager for the Middle Americas region that covers more than 10 countries. Her two main projects will focus on improving water availability for the Rimac River Watershed in Lima, Peru, and in the Calera aquifer in Zacatecas, Mexico.
 

In her role as Sustainability Manager at Waitrose & Partners, Danielle was on the core team delivering an industry-leading packaging reduction initiative, Waitrose Unpacked.

The Waitrose Unpacked test launched in Oxford in summer 2019 and saw more than 200 products removed from their packaging to test how customers might be prepared to shop differently in the future, with the aim of saving thousands of tonnes of unnecessary plastic.

The concepts tested included, the largest range of loose fruit and veg of any national supermarket, 28 varieties of dried goods available to buy from refill dispensers, beers and wines on tap, frozen fruit to pick and mix, coffee to dispense and grind in store. Customers were encouraged to bring their own containers, or were able to borrow reusable boxes in store. The test period was initially 11 weeks, but an overwhelmingly positive response saw the trial extended and introduced into three further stores by the end of the year. 

Danielle has been working with environmental specialists to model the environmental impact of the Unpacked across the full supply chain. The findings have not yet been published but it is clear that it has the potential to significantly reduce single-use packaging. 

Additional initiatives which Danielle has worked on include Plan Plastic: The Million Pound Challenge, to fund five of the most innovative, impactful and interesting approaches to tackling plastic pollution. She presented her story during the Ambassadors in Action sessions at the One Young World 2019 Summit in London, and spoke at a One Young World London Caucus on solutions to climate change. Danielle has been a leading figure in the One Young World Plastics Working Group.

The UN has reported that 1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing in a push for affordable homes (1). Another troubling statistic regarding the construction industry is that it is responsible for around 40% of global energy consumption (2). Inspired by this issue, Yaseen and two fellow civil engineering students founded ModulusTech in June 2016. 

ModulusTech has invented a housing design that can be flat-packed and built in as little as three hours, at an extremely affordable cost of $11 per square foot. The flat-pack design allows 11 of these houses to be transported on a single truck, making it cheaper to transport. The materials are environment-friendly while the structure can withstand cyclonic winds, earthquakes and survive harsh climates. 

The organisation operates in Pakistan with a tight knit team of nine full-time employees, and has been supported with grants from their partners UNIDO, UNEP and the Islamic Development Bank totalling $120,000. The team has also secured cumulative $5,000 from the Momentum Tech conference and Hashoo Youth Entrepreneurship. This money has been invested into buildings which have provided accommodation to over 150 people. 

An expansion ModulusTech built for a local school provided access to education for 100 young girls. Additionally, the houses provide insulation three times more efficient than standard housing guidelines saving on utilities spending.

The team is currently developing a model that allows the refugees or the underprivileged population to mortgage these houses on simple and beneficial terms. Yaseen refers back to being connected with Paul Polman at the One Young World Summit which pushed him to focus more on the sustainability of their work, whilst fellow Ambassadors instilled in him an ambition to scale their work as much as possible.    

Sources:

(1) https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/10/567552-affordable-housing-key-deve…

(2) https://www.euractiv.com/section/climate-environment/video/decarbonisin…

Wandile is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ubuntu Design Group, a project which uses architecture and housing to overcome financial exclusion in a sustainable manner. He identified the issue that around 13% of South African families lack access to dignified housing (1) and set about correcting that injustice with his idea in 2015.

Wandile and his team recognised that the flaws of social housing is that it excludes consultation with the families, often are located far from economic opportunities, and lack the space for growth. As a result, Ubuntu properties are designed for each family specifically with the capacity to add space later, and each one contains a commercial space to allow for them to move beyond poverty. 

In 2017, the company built their pilot project for a low-income Durban based family also struggling with a disability. The commercial space was designed for their daycare SME. This project inspired Ubuntu to develop a unique model to work with both public and private companies to provide micro-mortgages for entrepreneurial low-income families. Not only did this provide dignified housing to a vulnerable family, but tripled the income of their small-business. 

Since the organisation was officially accredited in 2018, they have built households for 10 families, including rainwater collection systems which provided free, clean water directly into each household.

In 2020, Wandile aims to build a further 36 households, for which the organisation must fundraise an additional $1 million.

Sources:

(1) https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Housing/InformalSettlements/SERI…

Sara founded BUTA Art & Sweets to tackle the issue of unemployment in underprivileged communities, particularly vulnerable women. In Azerbaijan, there is no specific constitutional protection for the rights of women with disabilities (1). Sara’s personal research uncovered that 95% of women with ‘special needs’ are unemployed.

She began her organisation with a personal investment of 160 manat. The principle is to provide vocational skills training to women who are domestic care-givers, and women with disabilities, to financially empower them. 

Sara has organised over 20 programmes, led by women, for 17 women who are part of the organisation. Using the skills they learn from this programme, and with access to the 60 partner organisations Sara has identified, the participants earn around 200 manat per month from their produce. 

An additional 15 women from outside the programme have also attended workshops to develop their skill base, receiving the same access to education without the in-kind social support which Sara offers to the regular programme participants (e.g. travel discounts). 

This has all been achieved with no grants or sponsorship, growing organically to become one of the first organisations in Azerbaijan to focus on this issue. Sara hopes to have an indirect and exponential impact on cultural attitudes to disabilities and gender issues. 

Sara is also promoting the concept of social business in the country, where there is currently no definition in official legislation. Her proposal is currently being pushed through the government, and could have substantial long-term contribution to social investment in Azerbaijan.

Sara’s attendance at the One Young World Summit in 2018 has altered how her work is perceived locally, as it has received global recognition. She has reached bigger prospective partners as a consequence, and is on the verge of establishing 20 new business partnerships to accelerate her work.

Orlando is the Founder and Director of Km1, a youth-led coastal and marine conservation team focused on addressing marine litter, while also seeking to empower and involve the next generation of ocean leaders with environmental education programmes, social innovation workshops and citizen science projects.Since those humble origins, the organisation has formalised and professionalised with two main arms to its social impact: education and action. 

On the frontline, Orlando organises monthly beach cleanups, mobilising a network of young students. These efforts have intercepted and removed approximately 80,000 pounds (36,287kg) of plastic waste, which would otherwise be washed out to sea and incur irreversible damage to the ecosystem. 

As a long-term solution, Km1 hosts educational workshops in schools, businesses and even government departments to espouse the values of Km1, teach the science of climate change, and educate people how to make a difference. This reaches around 2,000 people per month. Since inception of the programmes in 2016, they have provided environmental education to over 100,000 Mexican youths. 

The support of the UN Environmental Programme Mexico and the Commission for Environmental Cooperation has been essential in reaching the level of impact Km1 have achieved. 

The organisation has also established a partnership with the UN for Clean Seas Workshops, and advocated locally and with a regional Commission to ban plastic bags in the city of Tijuana, the first Mexican city on the border with the US to approve a ban on disposable plastic bags. This measure will come into action in 2020 and will grant businesses a 24 month adaptation period. In a city which consumes 10.2 million single-use plastic bags, the impact will be monumental. 

Additionally, Km1 is building the Youth for the Ocean National Network, a structure that will gather coastal, marine and oceanic youth-led projects from across the country and will focus on advancing research, innovation, capacity building, and public policy.

In Zimbabwe around 16.6% are currently unemployed. Moreover, only around 55% of Zimbabweans have access to a bank account (1). To increase the access of the young to the labour force and financial inclusion ‘Youth Invest’ offers a variety of training and development programmes for young Zimbabweans.

Based on the conviction that “youth are an integral part of community change because of their resourcefulness and dynamic competencies’’, Youth Invest works on the empowerment of young people in Victoria Falls and Bulawayo. 

In September 2019, Youth Invest started implementing her ‘Promoting Rural Tourism Entrepreneurship’ project. This project increases the employment rate and income for young artisans in Victoria Falls. So far 61 young artisans have received training through this project. This training focuses on story-telling, digital marketing and financial literacy. 

Moreover, an online and physical hub has been established where these artisans can sell their projects and services. Through these efforts the income for these entrepreneurs is expected to increase with 87%. These training efforts promote long-term and sustainable entrepreneurship and employment in the tourism sector and thus increase financial independence in the area.

Alongside this Youth Invest has provided 16 capacity-buildings training and workshops on financial inclusion for young Zimbabweans in Bulawayo. These programs promote the accessibility of financial services to marginalized socio-economic groups. Over 1,000 young people and women have benefitted from these programs so far, improving their access to the financial system and capital.

Sources:

(1) https://globalfindex.worldbank.org/ 
 

Nadia and Fatema attended the One Young World Summits in Dublin and Bogota respectively, uniting to work as the Community Managers of one%, an innovative social enterprise in Bahrain which launched in September 2019. 

The two Ambassadors share a background in volunteering and social impact. and both were inspired by their One Young World experiences to pursue a career mobilising changemakers. They joined Fahad and Fawaz Algosaibi, founders of one%, who both have a mutual passion when it comes to volunteering and giving back to the community.

It is a global volunteering platform which connects willing volunteers all around the world with local opportunities to create social impact. The platform currently hosts opportunities from organisations based in Bahrain and the other Gulf Cooperation Council countries, with a wide variety of events including Beach Clean Ups, Tree Planting, and visits to the elderly homes. Individuals then register as potential volunteers, and can get involved with projects and campaigns which appeal to their sensibilities, or post their own events for others to join. This simplifies the process of connecting volunteers and socially impactful organisations. 

In five months, since founding, over 80 organisations have offered roles and advertised for volunteers on the app. In the same amount of time, 2,400 people have registered as volunteers on the site, of whom 1,000 have engaged in activities as a result. As of the date of data collection, the platform has accumulated 2,500 volunteering hours for the partner organisations.

The long-term and highly ambitious target and tag-line for the organisation is to enable 1 billion people to donate 1% of their time for a good cause, on a regular basis.

Mikee works for Unilab Foundation, a Filipino NGO which was founded in 2010. He manages various youth initiatives, two of which are Ideas Positive and Heads Up PH. 

After attending the One Young World in The Hague he helped to establish the Positive Youth Development Network and now serves as its Director of Communications and Partnerships. The organisation has embedded youth engagement as a core focus for development in the Philippines. This project sought to develop and harness the expertise of young leaders in the Philippines nationwide.

Ideas Positive runs an annual bootcamp to co-develop and accelerate innovative ideas from all 17 regions in the Philippines. Selection criteria varies from year to year, from LGBT rights to environment. The chosen teams in 2019 are addressing healthcare challenges in their local communities, and receiving two months of training before returning home for a six months implementation period in their respective communities. 
Since inception, the project has supported 108 youth-led projects across 228 communities, and in turn developed the capacity of 438 young Filipino leaders. Ideas Positive as a programme has engaged over 75,000 young leaders in volunteering efforts across a variety of projects which have impacted over 2.4 million people.

Mikee is also the leading figure behind #YouthCan forum, a three-day event for young leaders. Approximately 2,500 young leaders attended in 2019, a significant growth since 150 attending the inaugural event four years prior. 

The forum was run by a group of 20 ‘Ideas Positive’ alumni, and included 14 short courses to develop the theoretical and practical skills of attendees. One such class was run by Emmanuele Marie Parra in her capacity as One Young World’s Coordinating Ambassador for the region, to teach them how to create global impact with local solutions.

Along with his Co-Founder, Luke set about producing a shoe with optimised sustainability and that simultaneously supported conservation efforts. In turn, this off-set any unavoidable environmental costs of its manufacturing and distribution. 

Together, in 2017, they founded Two Degree Footwear and Apparel producing shoes called “Twos”, operating the enterprise part-time alongside their day jobs.

Shoe production raises a variety of nuanced sustainability questions. Leather has ethical issues and environmental implications from the tanning process and livestock emissions, while vegan alternatives are often petro-chemical based, less durable and do not biodegrade in landfill. 

After visiting a vast array of suppliers, they settled on the use of bio-leather, a waste product of the cattle industry tanned using an innovative bio-process free from heavy metals. The shoe boxes are biodegradable, and made from a single sheet of recycled cardboard. The rubber outsoles are made from recycled materials such as used car tyres and old outsoles. 

Despite minimising their emissions as much as possible, it is impossible to eliminate completely, and therefore through the “Feet for Feet” initiative, each pair of shoes sold protects 1,000 square feet of endangered rainforest. This project is run in partnership with World Land Trust.

In a kickstarter campaign, the company raised over $100,000 in pre-orders. Including sales since, they have protected over 1,200,000 square feet (11.15 hectares) of endangered rainforest in Mexico, Ecuador and Argentina. The ambition is to have protected 25 million square feet by 2020. 

Lola’s passion for female empowerment led her to leave her job to found her own organisation, ThinkHER Ambition. The Gender Gap remains a substantial issue in British society and stands at 17.9% (1). Lola aims to educate and inspire young women as a means of tackling this deep-rooted inequality.

Since its foundation in 2018, ThinkHER ambition has impacted the lives of over 700 young females from around the United Kingdom, through its services which includes programmes, workshops and events. In 2018, it became an official Google Academy Partner and has held three annual summits at the Academy Space, bringing together over 300 young females for interactive skills development, networking and inspiration. 

In 2019, ThinkHER launched a mentor programme in collaboration with Unilever for six female students who were being supported by their school’s pastoral team and at high risk of underachieving. This project offers them guidance, education and development to exponentially improve their employability, and life prospects holistically, with the opportunity to network with hard-working, successful women that work at Unilever.

ThinkHER has tapped into the expertise and resources of prestigious partners and participated in a Cass Business School Strategy programme to make the organisation as effective and professional as possible.
Lola credits the speeches of fellow Ambassadors such as Hyppolite Ntigurirwa and Ilwad Elman as providing her with a necessary sense of perspective to pursue her ambition, supported by regular contact with other members of the community. ThinkHER continues to develop strategies, launch new projects and aim to expand beyond London to have global reach.

Sources:

(1) https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsa…;

Leroy’s work in the area of waste disposal and clean energy production began with a high school science project, with a selection of his peers. Leroy co-founded Greenpact formally in 2014, a year before his graduation. It is an energy solution for farmers and schools in rural Kenya, a country where 25% of people still lack electricity access (1).

Greenpact’s installations repurpose agricultural waste from households, small rural farms and schools into a clean energy alternative. This allows rural families and small organisations to access cheap and safe, renewable energy. 

Before installing in a school or farm, the Greenpact team analyse the best-suited energy solution and dimensions. The client then purchases the concrete installation, which Greenpact trains them to use. The organisation also offers to train the client to maintain the solution, or Greenpact will offer that service itself. 

At a small-scale, the solution will power five complete days of clean energy for a household from the waste of three cows over a period of two weeks. The scale increases exponentially as the quantity of waste increases.
Customers are protected from the negative health consequences from unclean cooking, saved money from energy expenditure, and they protect the environment from damaging carbon emissions. 

Familes, and in particular women as per the household culture in Kenya, are saved time searching for firewood. Since foundation around 10,000 rural Kenyans have benefited from these impacts. That includes the teachers and students at 50 schools, and 70 installations in total.

Sources:

(1) https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/scienceandhealth/Clean-energy-Kenya-ge…;

Roughly 40% of the population in Pakistan live off-grid and rely on burning firewood and other biomass to provide energy in their homes. This dependence on polluting combustion materials is expensive, environmentally harmful and a big health concern. Khizr founded Jaan Pak, a clean energy social enterprise in 2014, having won the Rwanga Social Start Up competition at the One Young World Summit in Dublin.

The organisation used this seed funding to design a solution to unsustainable, open-fire cooking in Pakistan which has dangerous repercussions on people’s environment and health. In 2015, Jaan Pak imported solar thermal stoves from China – however, pilot testing showed that these were unsuitable for Pakistani culinary methods and people were unwilling to use them. Next, the team imported biomass stoves, which were expensive and received similar feedback. 

In 2017, Jaan Pak identified that they needed an indigenous solution. The organisation has designed three products (including a heater and two stoves) to provide clean, fuel efficient energy to households in Pakistan. After a long period of R&D, the product is now on the market and already in 2,000 households. The organisation has used education to create social impact, directly reaching 14,000 individuals with education on the damage of open wood cooking.

Having been recognised by the government as leading innovators, the team have provided their research and technology to the public sector that is now developing a policy to ban open fires and run a nationwide campaign on the economic, health and environmental benefits of clean cooking. Jaan Pak is an expert consultant to the government on a change that has the potential to impact 100 million people across the country.