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SDG Impact Projects

Every year 100 young leaders from over 30 countries collaborated to create over 20 impact projects addressing

UN Sustainable Development Goals. Below, you find information about selected projects, some of which are currently mentored by the University of Oxford in the follow-up of GLC 2020-2023.

- Challenge:
In the information age, the problem of skill mismatch prohibits people with no or insufficient access to ICT in low resource settings from effectively participating in the digital economy. As the education challenges in the digital age go beyond the walls of school settings, parental and wider community involvement play a critical role in accelerating students’ digital learning. Schools can act as anchor institutions in their communities to engage other sectors and agents to work together.

- Actions:
Our program - “It Takes Three” - involves the parents as active agents in the co-learning process with their children under the coaches of master trainers. We also encourage parents to learn alongside them and become positive role models. By working with public, private sectors as well as NGOs, our intervention is as follows:
1. Organize community-based learning clusters led by pilot schools
2. Train motivated teachers into certified master trainers on digital skills
3. Adopt project based learning (a teaching method in which students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects)
4. Promote parent-child co-learning sessions delivered by master trainers
5. Employ hybrid service delivery models, including local centers/family groups/home visits/digital/remote methods, to adjust to different institutional and cultural context

- Impact:
By focusing on the triangular relationship between the students, teachers and parents:
1. We aim to reach a primary outcome for the students to improve digital learning results and their career prospects.
2. Additionally, the program benefits other stakeholders in the ecosystem, for example career advancement for teachers and family relationship improvement.
3. In the long-term, it will break the cycle of under-education and low labor force participation.
4. By cultivating a sense of responsibility that starts at home and on to community, this program encourages intergenerational empowerment of lifelong learning.

"It Takes Three"

The Problem: Unpaid domestic care work done by Women. It matters because:
1) Women spend 2x to 10x more time on unpaid care work than men.
2) it is the missing link in the analysis of wage gender gaps in labor outcomes.
3) Lower wages for women means lower quality of life which initiates a ripple effect on their children and so on.

We plan to address the challenge by challenging the stereotype acclaimed to women on unpaid care through:
Action: Leverage the power of social media to run a roleplay campaign. Participants strategically nominate the next role-play actors(including institutions).
Context: African countries with the highest social media reach - S/Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco.
Partnerships: The Art communities (NFTs), social media influencers i.e. Falz/Mr. Macaroni; YouTuberWode Maya, Tiktokers (Khabane).

Short-term outcomes:
1) Recognise the concept of unpaid domestic care and consequently promote a new narrative that encourages shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate. 2) Drive awareness amongst public and private institutions

Long-term outcomes include changing societal mental models on prolonged hours of domestic care done by women and redistributing policies at institutional & national levels that enforce paid domestic care work for women & shared responsibilities with men.
Therefore, this project leads to a better world for the younger & next generation of women through leadership with empathy and creates an avenue for male leaders to empathize with women in their society. The project is a sustainable solution to Gender stereotypes and gender wage gaps, domestic care because it initiates a long loop that eliminates wage gaps as women have more hours to earn and more mental capacity to be productive.

Roleplay Challenge “Become a Wife for a Day”

- Challenge:

Climate refugees are people displaced due to extreme weather events caused due to climate change, which could push an additional 100 million people into poverty by 2030. Currently, extreme weather events and natural disasters contribute to the displacement of more than 200 million people per year. Informal settlements have an estimated growth rate of 9.85%. As of 2021, over 1 billion people who live in slums, are more vulnerable if they live near high-disaster-risk areas. Climate justice recognises that climate change can have a variety of social, economic, public health, and other negative consequences for impoverished populations. Therefore, tracking informal settlements which are high risk is important for climate justice to ensure timely aid and policy intervention.

- Solution:

Our solution is two-fold, first involves identification and tracking of informal settlements, and second is to recommend policy interventions using machine learning. How are we going to achieve that? A web-based dashboard for all stakeholders to engage with. Our pipeline begins with data collection as we collect and process satellite data using open-access Copernicus services. We build a supervised machine learning model with labels of regions of high disaster risk and existing informal settlements using the locations known from the literature. Using the model, we identify regions of informal settlements. We infer the size of informal settlements via satellite data and the spatial resolution of the satellite used. Over time, we aim to use the dashboard to visualise and reflect the impact of climate-based extreme weather events on the size, shape, location, migration and estimated population density of informal settlements. As we deploy the dashboard, we aim to collect data about policy interventions in the regions of interest via our stakeholders over time. We measure the effectiveness of policy intervention first by visualising the changes in informal settlement sizes and second by conducting qualitative surveys and asking climate refugees about their feedback. We incorporate the policy effectiveness and recommendation information on our web-based dashboard as a pop-up text as one hovers over a particular location.

- Impact:

Our solution is aimed to maximize positive impact on people at risk, and efficiency of disaster response. First, sharing the location and migration of vulnerable communities via our dashboard means international, national or local aid can increase the quality of life and protect human rights. Second, it fosters collaboration between NGOs, governments, the private sector and academia to create better intervention strategies to help displaced communities in extreme climate events. Every leader in the public or private sector has a limited time to make quick and efficient decisions. Our tool compresses huge amounts of information to recommend policies and allocate optimal resources for climate refugees. Third, we provide an ethical mapping of regions to prevent data misuse and enable access to geographical data visualisations to only relevant stakeholders. We mitigate any security, privacy or social risks as we do not reveal the exact location of any specific individual. Lastly, our tools can help smart construction and rebuilding long-term housing for displaced minorities in newer and low-risk areas. With our solution, we support not only SDG 13 (Climate Action) but also SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities And Communities) as well. We innovate responsibly by creating new societal value for the poorest of the poor, often ignored in sustainable development goals.

Protect Climate Refugees

Our sustainable future depends on local action and lasting and meaningful impact. This is particularly true for developing countries. To make sure, we achieve sustainable progress there, we need to adopt a new mindset based on new principles of:
- Enabling locally  
- Fostering high-impact entrepreneurship  
- Building on social enterprise principles  
- Collaborating on eye-level

We therefore see entrepreneurship as the best way of achieving equitable and sustainable development. However, women in particular, still face many problems when wanting to start their business. We want to focus on education to remove the structural barriers that still keep many highly talented women from starting their business. These problems can be summarised under 3 main bullets:
- Limited Access to Financing Options
- Persistent Knowledge Gaps
- Lack of encouragement
To support and empower promising, young female entrepreneurs working on innovative, scalable solutions for societal or ecological problems, we are designing a fellowship program which addresses those three topics by focusing on hands-on capacity-building, mindset building and financial support. The program will focus on practical skills and personal mentoring to support the founders through their journey and a monthly stipend will allow to try out entrepreneurship worry free and pursue their dreams and visions in a safe space.

This empowers them to create lasting impact and contribute to inclusive and meaningful growth. We believe many challenges in the development context can be solved through making entrepreneurship more accessible and fostering innovation which will countries to leapfrog development. We do this by unleashing the power of technology and focusing on scalable, high-growth initiatives and help them to scale up and run their business successfully. This will enable us to establish financial equality and trigger societal change by creating a ripple effect that magnifies our impact beyond what we could have achieved alone.

Empowering Female Entrepreneurs in Developing Countries

Create an immersive and interactive experience that allows users to visualize the climate impact of their actions, track their government’s actions in local languages, petition against harmful policies, or talk to experts to understand the implications of these climate actions.

Climate Action Tracker

We propose to address three critical areas within the scope of factors leading to gender inequality via our easy-to-use, multilingual, free app solution-1st - the gender based data gap that has led to the promulgation of gender-biased education resources, 2nd-the accessibility and affordability gap of education by women in war-torn areas, and people with disabilities and 3rd- the gap between skill-set existing amongst these invisible groups within women and job opportunities made available to them.
We envision women as “Right Holders” hence it becomes critical to address and rectify the existing gender data gaps in the curriculum as these perpetuate gender stereotypes amongst women. Second, our vision extends to the recognition of gender-specific skillsets and training that may be required for invisible groups within women (for example women in war-torn areas and women with disabilities) to secure a job of their dreams.
The platform we envision provides training and quality educational resources specifically catering to the needs and interests of each rightholder, with the help of AI-based solutions, formulating a holistic approach of fun-filled games-based training and creating an educational virtual reality that may especially be helpful for women with disabilities (less mobility).
We will also feature invisible women in history who have contributed magnanimously to STEM, politics, literature etc. from all walks of life on our platform as role models to create positive attitudinal changes.
We will be partnering with Coursera, LinkedIn learning and Khan Academy in a bid to provide free access to education We have come up with a subscription-model for our male supporters, the revenue generated thereof will be used to fund operations and support the women in accessing education opportunities in vulnerable situations. Empowering future women leaders with self-confidence, resilience, empathy, and purpose would be the larger impact of our proposal.

Empower Women to Education and Jobs

Education systems are constantly lagging behind in terms of preparing today's youth for the future. Requirements change faster than ever before but the educational systems lag behind in addressing these rapidly changing needs.

New skills emerge rapidly, but current systems fail to appropriately create the incentive and communication channels such that the flow from industry needs can rapidly manifest in actual changes to what students learn in school.

We propose a two-part solution that addresses these concerns both from a technological point of view and also from a system incentive point of view. The symbiosis of these two elements is what constitutes the encompassing solution which is not only technologically sound but also recognises the incentive structure of all relevant stakeholders.

Open Source Data Platform
(1) Student Skills (2) Market Need (3) Adaptation Rate
→ objective data to inform trade-offs

Incentive structure: why will stakeholders report & act?
- Employer: professional org req, taxes, benchmarks
- Schools: automate, allow+reward experimentation
- Education boards: international benchmarking
- Governments: employment outcomes reporting

Goals
- Short-term. Partnership with teachers association & ministry of education in a specific country looking to change curriculum → a modern and adaptable curriculum
- Medium. Education Roundtables, Benchmarking
- Long. Countries all around the world continuously and cheaply adapt to changing demands

Ed Canopus

While much of rural India lacks access to quality education in general, this has been particularly exemplified in the last few years by the reliance on online learning. 946 million (96%) of rural Indian population lacks access to computers (1) and around 700 million (71%) people in rural India lacks access to internet (2). Tech-to-Teach aims to bridge this gap to empower local communities, by developing e-learning centers in communities to transform the learning experience and prepare the children for the digital future.

At the heart of the project lies close cooperation with businesses The businesses would provide the digital devices which are not needed by them. The devices would be data formatted and installed with an off-line e-learning tool (like Kolibri). The curriculum would be developed for children between the age of 10 to 18, having a focus on both hard skills (math, science etc.) and soft skills (language, entrepreneurship, communication etc.). The devices would then be transported from Tech-to-Teach hubs to respective learning centers in rural areas. The teaching via the apps would be in gamified form to improve classroom engagement, moving from traditional learning methods to a more enriching learning experience.

The project is driven by the fundamentals of sustainability and an equitable future, by maximizing resource utilization to provide basic opportunities via education to everyone. The tangible impacts would be realized in the local economy where proliferation of tech knowledge would open local employment opportunities for the children, boost their confidence, and improve their soft skills (e.g., language). Furthermore, this project opens an important dialogue between the different stakeholders to collectively address important challenges at the most grassroot level and directly or indirectly impact other sustainable development goals (e.g., Gender equality, escaping poverty to name a few) by utilizing strengthening global partnerships (SDG17).

Tech-to-Teach: End-to-end offline-education model

Mental Health App "ConnectUs"

As of 2018, Generation X occupies 51% of the decision-making roles globally, and constitutes 75% of the EU's MPs. Across the EU, older generations have higher attribution to skepticism and lesser perception of the consequences of climate change compared to younger generations (Poortinga et al., 2019). Climate change is an issue with inter-generational impact, thus, decision made today will have a longer term impact on the future. As a result, it is imperative for decision-makers to understand the importance of their climate decisions, and for younger generation feel that adequate measures are taken so that it does not lead to extreme actions.

This is why, during the Global Leadership Challenge, we have introduced Dialogues for Future, facilitating inter-generational dialogue on climate change. Where dialogues on climate change through:
1. Workshops for communication trainings
- Com. training on NVC, Socratic dialogue, other
- Science based inputs on climate change facts
- Community building
2. Database of resources including how-to videos and blueprints for comm. and political engagement
3. Facilitated Dialogue Sessions between certified climate change debaters and decision makers

This would in turn benefit generations through:
1. Short-term:
- Participants of Gen Z/ Y: Acquire climate knowledge, build communication skills, address perception gap among generations
- Participants Gen X/ Boomers: Awareness of climate change influence on them (economic, health, etc.)
2. Long-term:
- Foster intergenerational understanding and build a sense of responsibility; unify people of different generations to achieve a common goal; together act/ convince decision makers to fight climate change.
- Establish a community of climate-enthusiasts, affiliates and stakeholders around the world for future initiatives, enriched with know-how through the climate database.

We are looking to bridging inter-generational differences by breaking up generational echo chambers and foster engagement through productive, respectful dialogue, promote empathy across generations, and address vulnerability e.g. fear of change/ future; we are also looking to empowering individuals to drive change by showing them a path of action and give voice to engaged youth, and share feeling of purpose and belonging, encourage to tackle ‘wicked problems’ and acting instead of feeling hopeless.

Dialogues for the Future

Public and private sector procurement accounts for 20-30% of global GDP each year. The tremendous purchasing power is capable of shifting demand towards new products and services with a lighter carbon footprint. Our group plan consult with organization to implement SP framework, create prioritized product list, implement procurement e-platform, and conduct trainings to help organizations improve their SP practices. In the long term, we aim to make SP mandatory for all procuring entities. Market power will become the invisible hand to shift the production of products and services to be more sustainable. Price of sustainable products will drop as more options become available on the market.

Building Green Market through Sustainable Procurement

Feelings of loneliness peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic, with nearly 60% of the young population reporting high levels of loneliness. Those who were most affected were young people and older adults. Loneliness significantly impacts mental health and has been linked to depression, anxiety, and substance use. Therefore, generating wide-ranging societal mental and physical health burdens on already strained healthcare systems. As a result, many countries have already begun to address the issue of loneliness by instituting Ministries of Loneliness as a part of their mental health agenda. This proposed InterGeneration is an evidence-based platform that fosters dynamic, reciprocal mentorship between youth and older adults through 1:1 guided sessions to increase protective factors of mental health, specifically meaningful social connections and educational engagement, thereby addressing loneliness at its roots. Significant research supports the role of mentoring relationships as a means to reduce symptoms of depression and loneliness and improve the overall quality of life. While traditional mentorship programs are largely unidirectional, InterGenerations structured mentorship sessions involve the bi-directional sharing of skills and perspectives between youth and older adults and a matching algorithm based on users' context and priorities. This platform could partner with institutions such as schools, community centres, and retirement facilities. We see this project as enabling younger mentors to gain confidence, skills and access to networks. While for older mentors, this will allow them to give back to society while gaining skills and a sense of purpose. All at the same time, capitalising off the currently underutilised value of meaningful intergenerational relationships.

InterGeneration

Our project is called "Children’s Road to Lifelong Mental Wellbeing", and focuses on developing self-awareness and resilience through mental health literacy.

The challenge we want to tackle is children’s mental wellbeing. Children’s mental wellbeing is often neglected -- for example, in the OECD brief about mental health, children were not even mentioned. This is despite overwhelming evidence that childhood experiences massively impact the risk of developing mental health disorders in adulthood and that children’s mental health starts to decline around age 11. Also, polarization in communities can lead to the isolation of children and the stigma surrounding mental health and wellbeing adds additional dimensions to this challenge. It’s also more difficult for children to express their mental health needs leading to inaccessibility to mental health services.

We were inspired by the Friendship Bench project founded by Dixon Chibanda. We want to integrate mental wellbeing into the school curriculum to hold space for children from different backgrounds to discuss mental wellbeing facilitated by self-selected teachers and community members.These sessions focus on mindfulness, gratitude, emotional intelligence, reducing stereotyping & coping with uncertainty. We want to educate these facilitators in mental wellbeing through a digital companion. We will safeguard facilitators by encouraging them to check in with each other after each session, and to get in touch with the initiative coordinators. This way, children learn how to manage their mental wellbeing and develop a lifelong skill set to manage mental wellbeing. We believe that with our team and our joint experience in youth mental health and policy making, we can make this happen.

In terms of impact, making a small shift to a child’s mindset or coping ability early in life can drastically change their trajectory into adulthood. By integrating mental wellbeing sessions in schools, we increase the access to care and increase mental health literacy. In the long term, this program will teach children how to communicate their feelings with their peers and to overcome differences in their backgrounds to connect with each other on a human level. This will reduce the risk of future mental illness and improve the happiness index. Finally, this program will enable generational knowledge exchange and raise awareness about mental wellbeing, thereby reducing the stigma.

This initiative demonstrates responsible leadership in action by promoting resiliency, self-awareness and empowerment among children. In addition, we build empathetic communities and reduce polarisation through open communication. This initiative cultivates the skills of current and future community leaders by training them in mental health literacy. And finally, it links to multiple SDGs such as 4, 5, 10, and 16.

Children’s Road to Lifelong Mental Wellbeing

During this pandemic, have you felt increased levels of anxiety? Or had trouble sleeping? Or felt increased levels of loneliness? If your answer is YES to any of these, you’re not alone. As we faced worldwide lockdowns and lost loved ones to this terrifying virus, we have grappled with some tough emotions.

While COVID-19 has been ravaging our world, there is an undercurrent of a global mental health crisis that has gone largely neglected. It has affected 1 billion people globally, and COVID-19 has accounted for an additional >100M cases of depression and anxiety. 40% of those in distress do not seek help. For those who seeked help, only 50% are correctly diagnosed with the current subjective diagnostic criteria. If we do not act promptly, the mental health crisis is projected to cost $16 trillion USD to the global economy, primarily due to early age of onset and loss of productivity.

What if we could have a simple non-invasive wearable device that is able to objectively detect physiological indicators of mental distress? What if we could have an algorithm which predicts the level of mental distress that requires medical attention, and immediately connects you with a medical professional via telehealth?

We present to you Sensiment, an integrated platform that comprises a non-invasive wearable hardware and a smartphone application. The wearable device leverages state of the art sensing technologies to monitor physiological parameters of mental distress such as heart rate, body temperature, skin conductance and sweat cortisol levels. By using a machine learning algorithm, we can then use these indicators to build a multivariable model to predict significant mental distress levels. This will then notify the user, which can prompt the user for a follow-up action through the app's self-care kit, AI chatbot and ultimately a telehealth consultation with a mental health professional.

After the Global Leadership Challenge, our multidisciplinary team comprising of healthcare professionals, engineers, and social scientists, will work on producing the prototype and then carrying out a small scale pilot study in a developed country, such as the UK where most people would have a smartphone device. We will then evaluate the sensitivity, specificity and effectiveness of our product. If proven to be satisfactory, we will then expand nationally, regionally and then internationally to the rest of the world, especially in the low to middle income countries.

Now imagine a world where this technology reaches the hands of people without access to professional mental health services - how much could their lives be changed? This could help bridge mental health inequality globally, where everyone can receive the care they need, anytime, anywhere.

The war against the mental health crisis is an incredibly complex challenge, we will not be able to make a dent on this crisis without you.

Will you be up for the challenge and join us in our fight?

SENSIMENT – Addressing the Global Mental Health Crisis

Whilst the public is constantly generating health-related data, such data - as an ever more valuable commodity - is increasingly gatekept, and utilised without transparency, by large corporations. As such, this data is often unavailable to institutions and researchers. Consequently, healthcare research is often based on, and reflects, limited selections of the population. Moreover, the resultant research is often published in venues and forms inaccessible to the general public. These issues culminate in a lack of public voice in health research and decision-making.

Munity, a community empowerment and equitable information exchange platform, seeks to remedy these issues through supporting individuals in reclaiming ownership of, and leveraging, their health data to instigate and promote research-informed change in healthcare and offers access to resources and information to support public health and well-being. Munity affords users the opportunity to select health research projects with which to (anonymously) share their data, and enables access to research-based healthcare information, insights, and guidance developed therethrough (researchers are obliged to share research insights, and are incentivised to engage with the community through a rewards system). Thus, the platform promotes transparent, representative health research, developed community health and well-being knowledge, and provides a forum in which communities may mobilise in advocating for research-informed healthcare change and reform.

Munity is foreseen as having a number of impacts. Firstly, the platform will democratise health research through facilitating greater public involvement and representation in research processes. Secondly, Munity fosters greater research transparency, offering a platform where researchers and the general public may engage and incentivising the sharing of research-based information, insights, and guidance. All of this ultimately empowers communities, the third area of impact, in taking greater control of their personal data and its use, developing health and well-being knowledge, and advocating for healthcare change and reform in an informed manner.

Munity: A Community for Health Research Democratisation

Challenge:
Lack of education is a major push to child marriage especially in rural communities of LMICs, with children not going to school being about 3 times more likely to get married early.
The longer schools remain closed due to COVID-19 measures, girls are more likely to drop out of school than boys and not return due teenage pregnancies, which has drastically increased since the lockdown and most of these pregnant girls face criticism from parents and teachers forcing them to abandon school.
The economic hardship on families caused by the pandemic has predisposed about 10million girls to child marriage worldwide.

Ensuring girls' access to quality education:
- providing free school supplies (so, less burden on parents),
- providing a transportation to school (bicycle for girls, so it's safer for them to commit to schools),
- vocational trainings (to equip them with new practical skills for further employment or work from home due to COVID-19)
- Conduct information and educational campaigns through local communities, churches or mosques among residents of remote regions on the consequences of early marriage to young girls (physical, psychological, economic)
- Working with community based organisations to carry out community assessment

Impact
Through the implementation of our actions/activities, we’d have informed communities in developing countries where women and girls are treated as key stakeholders in policy making using their influence and domain to advocate for the rights and privileges of women and girls.
Our educational campaigns will foster the promotion of brave and safe spaces and empower women and girls to be able to use their voice and skills to add value to their communities and empower other girls and women.
With these actions taken it will reduce the rate of early marriages which in turn will keep girls in school enabling them to contribute to the socio-economic development of their communities.

Responsible Leadership
This project demonstrates responsible leadership in the following ways:
1. Changing the norm - with our actions taken we want to keep young girls in education and reduce the rate of early marriages. Our key aim over time is to change the norms and the way girls and women contribute to their society.
2. Joy in seeing others grow - One key component of responsible leadership is making the growth of others a key component of your leadership aims. With our initiative, not only do we want to help keep young girls out of early marriage, we also want to help them get a quality education. We believe that not only will this help the girls, but it will also help the boys and the later women, men and entire community.
3. Leading with empathy and compassion - We pledge to lead with compassion and empathy when talking with the different stakeholders. We understand that for example parents may see marriage as a safe-haven for young girls and we will have to demonstrate how we believe to have found a feasible alternative that may even help their children more in a compassionate and empathetic way. In certain communities young marriages have been practiced for generations and it is important that we listen to their needs and wants and understand that the topic may be sensitive to some. We aim to treat all stakeholders with understanding, even if their views may be contrary to ours.
4. Active listening to the communities and our stakeholders - (goes hand in hand with point three of leading with compassion and empathy). We understand that in certain communities child marriage has been practiced for generations - we think listening to the communities and there reasons for child marriage will be very important. We need to understand their deep needs. This way we can try to address any underlying concerns they may have. We understand that without having the community on board, we will never be able to create lasting change. For that reason active listening - and learning from the communities - will be a key component of our leadership style.
5. Focus on positive impact - We want to focus on the positive instead of the negative.
Not only that but we want to center our communication by focusing on the positive impact - articulating it, believing in it and living with a clear purpose and vision. Positive leaders deliberately define and live their values, strengths, and passions, and they understand that the same needs to be done at the organizational level.
6. Empowering others - we want to empower young girls and help them empower their entire communities. We truly believe that by preventing early marriages in girls, not only are we helping them but their future kids, the husbands and the community. A key component of responsible leadership also includes empowering your employees, letting them assume responsibility and empowering your employees to empower themselves. We want to focus on empowering others and letting them take ownership and commitment for decisions.

Education and Child Marriage amidst COVID-19

Young professionals in the global workforce (20-34 yrs) are most eager to prove themselves resulting in high levels of loneliness, anxiety, depression due to burnout. The symptoms exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic and are set to continue in the post pandemic world. The stigma of mental health causes huge gaps in the prevention and treatment of such diseases. In fact, there is the prevalent toxic view that "burnout is an inevitable psrt of success" despite chronic burnout causing 26-35% higher risk of early mortality. One of the consequences on our society ist the global GDP loss of 1T$ due to productivity loss from anxiety and depression.
Icebreakers addresses the above described issues impacting the situation as follows. In the short term, peer-support through buddy system tackles 25% rise in anxiety and depression (pandemic-induced) while addressing 40% prevalence of loneliness in young professionals.
In the long term, celebrating self-care change stories via community meetings demystifies the toxic beliefs about mental health, mitigates stigmatisation, and reduces threshold for seeking care in young professionals.

Icebreakers

• Gender stereotypes that are internalised in the
minds of girls which prevent them from being
independent decision makers to the extent that
they surrender to their futures being determined
for them. We are specifically targeting
stereotypes that cannot be tackled through
receiving school education.
• Internalised empowerment of women ensures a
life-long of correct choices.
Creating a reference of life skills in the form of
an App called “For Life” for women aged 11-18.
Two categories of life skills will be central to our
project: Empower girls to 1) deal with difficult
situations 2) identify & utilize opportunities
● Magazine format in areas with limited access
to technology.
● A list of emergency contact list for each
country.
● Mentor/mentee pairing

● Short term outcome: The App will be
available for free in one developed
country and the magazine distributed
monthly in one developing country.
● Long term Outcome: Reach at least 5
more countries by 2030.

‘For Life’: Empowering Girls for a Bright Future

With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, the primary challenge is that an alarming majority of countries around the world have yet to adapt their educational curriculums to meet the demands of the future.

The lack of Industry 4.0 integration into the educational curriculum of nations around the world creates a significant gap in the labor market and its readiness to meet the demands of the future.

This issue greatly affects countries in both the developed and developing ends of the spectrum, thus, there is a clear need for proactive steps to be taken for the young workforce to be ready for the needs of the future.

The venture is implemented in 3 phases per partner country:

Phase 1 National Assessment (1 year)
We identify gaps in the national curriculum

Phase 2 Proof of Concept Stage (2-5 years)
Based on these gaps, we develop interventions for schools at the local level as part of the pilot stage. We work with local schools first in order to build a solid case for scaling up to the regional-national level.

Phase 3 National Integration (5-10 years)
Once we have a solid case utilizing our impact data, the dialogue can begin on integration on the national level.

The primary goal of the program is to equip students and recalibrate existing national frameworks to adapt to the needs of the future - by working directly with the government, Octavia aims to build lasting systems that will create systemic change in the countries where we will operate in.

Octavia

Common Mental Disorders are a significant global problem affecting 1 billion people annually, but they disproportionately affect low- and middle-income countries, where up to 90% of the burden of disease occurs. The COVID-19 pandemic has also exacerbated mental health issues, with a 25% increase in prevalence, particularly among vulnerable populations such as senior citizens and young adults. In Africa, there is a severe shortage of mental-health workers, with only 1.6 per 100,000 population in 2020, compared to 45 per 100,000 in Europe. Additionally, stigma surrounding CMD’s and affordability prevents many people from seeking care, leading to a downward spiral of poverty and poor health outcomes.

To address these challenges, we developed Ubuntu, a multi-faceted community-based intervention aimed at tackling the problem from both ends in our target country: Nigeria. Through the use of SMS broadcasts containing educational content on common mental disorders, we aim to raise public awareness and knowledge on a national scale, normalizing vulnerability and encouraging positive health-seeking behaviors. We will also scale up task shifting initiatives, training laypeople, community matriarchs and nurses to act as mental health workers in rural community hubs, where 60% of the population lives. This will not only increase the effective mental health workforce, but also promote intergenerational and bidirectional knowledge and support exchange, building capacity for future generations and protecting the most vulnerable.

In the short term, we aim to reach a potential 30 million people over the course of a year, while also linking them with trained, empathetic community-based mental health workers. In the long term, our goal is to break the cycle of poverty and mental health issues and create societies that can reach their full socioeconomic potential, free from stigma and the devastating consequences of suicide and mental health disorders.

Ubuntu = (Zulu) ‘togetherness/humanity to others’

Frontline communities in a lot of developing countries lack timely access to climate risk information and urgent environmental notifications, what makes them vulnerable to extreme weather events, resulting in food and water insecurity, conflict, migration etc. Around 21.5 million people have been forcefully displaced annually since 2008 by weather-related events and around 1.2 billion climate migrants are estimated by 2050. Tackling the issue of lacking climate information could have a fruitful impact where it is desperately needed.

Thats why we came up with the concept of an hybrid solution that provides area-specific, actionable climate information to vulnerable communities using a three-fold communication system that is being translated into the respective local language. As a first step, the solution will convert complex digital meteorological data into actionable information provided to communities as weekly updates. People lack not only the information, but also the ability to read them in a way that is applicable to their respective challenges. Thats why easy language and quick application to farm and household decisions is crucial. In a second way, the system will provide a predictive model meant to alert the local community of upcoming short and medium-term climate risks (extreme temperatures, severe storms, wildfires, mudslides, water shortage) and will give them information, how to mitigate these risks. Lastly, it should give urgent updates and natural disaster warnings, so people will be somehow able to prepare for floods etc.

In the short term, the solution will have an impact on individuals access to critical climate information, what will enable them to take informed farm-level (when to plant, when to process farm products, when to irrigate etc.) and household-level decisions (what kind of clothes to wear etc.). In turn, this will offer them autonomy, agency, and the capacity to devise adaptation strategies and build resilience in the face of adversity.
In the long-term, a general increase in food security, improved rural livelihoods, increased social cohesion and reduced climate-induced socio-cultural and economic grievances should occur. This aims to promote climate, social, gender and racial justice, as well as peace.

Climate Info-powerment - build resilience to climate risk

Challenge - Currently, a significant number of people worldwide are working on climate actions. However, in the majority of the population, there is widespread climate despair, and the difference between climate mitigation and climate adaptation thoughts is hurdling the progress of effective transformation to net zero. The existence of borders between communities and nations are preventing effective synergies on climate initiatives of different scale. Effective social dialogue has proved very challenging in many places and industries where a majority of revenue is coming from the old practice of unsustainable extractions. The potential of people's action power remains hidden.

Action - We propose to create a peer-to-peer platform that addresses these issues called Climate Xchange. People from different parts of the world could have equal access to this place. A climate mitigator and climate adaptor are being matched on the basis of different backgrounds. They meet regularly online for a period depending on the scale of problems that they are currently facing. Additional information on empowering climate action and question sets are being used to guide the process of knowledge exchange, responsibility sharing, and collective action on common interests. Once the matching period ends, generation from the peer is shared globally.

Impact - This platform will build the feeling of climate action that is currently lacking among the general public. In the short term, there will be a large number of pairs being formed on the Climate Xchange platform, and their collaboration process could generate many invaluable insights on climate action, which could, in turn, significantly enlarge the synergy among climate action projects of adaptation and mitigation in different parts of the world under different contexts. In the long term, a global network of Climate Xchanger is being created, and their experiences are being shared, scaling the climate actions.

Climate Xchange

Consumer polling shows that many people are interested in adjusting their consumption behaviours in order to lower their environmental impact. However, many consumers are unaware of how best to make these changes, and what options are available. Worse still, a large amount of apps, platforms and websites already exist to drive individual sustainability, but these tools are disbursed and have low user numbers, making them less effective and confusing consumers.

This is where Green Map comes in. In an environment of too many options and too few users, Green Map will help consumers make climate-friendly choices in an efficient, accessible and intuitive way.

Green Map is an easy-to-install extension, which can be added to one’s browser and apply to apps such as Google Maps. When added, Green Map will allow Google Maps’ 1.5 billion monthly users to simply click on a button and overlay a map of sustainable consumption options, revealing greener choices.

At first, a given business's status as 'sustainable' will be determined using existing sustainability rating systems, like B-Corp. Green Map will also highlight farmer's markets and second-hand stores, which in their nature contribute to a green economy and locally-sourced consumption.

Green Map will have strong sustainability impacts, both at the level of the user and the business. In highlighting sustainable consumption options and helping millions of users to prioritize climate-friendly behaviours, Green Map directly meets the challenge of UN SDG 13 (Climate Action). It also provides exposure for green businesses, increasing the visibility of sustainable consumption and contributing to a greener economy.

In an environment of too many options and too little app engagement, Green Map provides a feasible and accessible way for consumers to make climate-friendly choices, within an app that they already use.

It's time to map out a green future together.

Green Map

SAGO FOR INTERGENERATIONAL GENDER EQUALITY

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