 Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming. We're going to get started here. We have a few solutions reports of 2018. This is the second edition. We all at SDSM are working on it. I am a huge solution report of the flagship project of SDSM youth, the global youth initiative of the New York Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which was launched in 2012. This is the office of the New York Secretary General and directed by the professor. This report work is going to highlight 50 youth led transformative projects in areas of economic development, social inclusion and environmental sustainability, showcasing the importance of youth involvement in achieving the sustainable development goals. Their innovative ideas and drive to be front runners on the path to accomplishing the 2013 agenda proves how vital the participation of young people in both multiple pressing issues is and continues. This report has benefited from the information and inputs provided by members of SDSM, the leadership council, the advisory panel, many outside youth experts and our partners who have collaborated with the preparation of this year's report. So we thank all of them for their support in helping us do the possible. Our first speaker, her name is Sarah Rallybeck. She is a youth delegate of the permanent mission of the Kingdom of Denmark to the UN. She is a communication advisor and has a background in youth policy and international development. Last year, the launch of the first edition of the Youth Solution of the Report was hosted by the permanent mission of Denmark. So today we're very pleased to have her here on behalf of the permanent mission and supported the report, the work of SDSM youth innovations in achieving the sustainable development goals. So please give her a warm welcome. Thank you very much. And I just want to say it's an honor addressing all of you here today on behalf of Denmark. I am one of six youth delegates in Denmark, trying to turn the SDSM into reality. And as a youth delegate, I represent the Danish youth at, for example, the HLPL this week and last week. I communicate the global goals to the youth and engage with them in trying to find innovative solutions. And we get to engage a lot of people from diverse backgrounds to discuss the importance of sustainable development. I get to be an advocate of why youth has to be engaged in the form of structures. We just recently expanded the National Youth Delegate Programme from one to six because we recognize the impact of meaningful youth inclusion and how it brings us closer to reaching the 2030 agenda. Obviously this is not news to you, you all know and reckon. The added value we create when engaging and creating a new shift on the content of the 17 goals. As youth are in fact the one half of the world population, it makes very good sense to bring such a stakeholder into the room for discussion and decision making. You already know. This is something that many still don't know. And that's why we're here today. Because we still need a serious talk about how we tell the rest of the world and how we ensure that they understand. Therefore I'm very pleased to be giving this keynote speech in the context of the just published youth solution report. To enhance the understanding of youth that is sustainable development projects, we need the good examples. Because in the fight for meaningful youth participation, Sharon is here. And Sharon will allow me to quote. For us, it's survival. If we don't transition faster, our homes will not exist in 20 years. These are the words of young activists who had just been three weeks on the peace book. She's from the Fiji Islands and alongside with her fellow activists from small island states, she is raising awareness and doing projects with strong focus on SNP 14. This meeting made a very special impact on me. This was the first time I had spoken in person to young island experts about issues that matter to them. And right now, youth inclusion is still a privilege rather than a right. It's for the few rather than for the many. I'm sorry, but that's simply not good enough. We still need to show representation of youth in the sense we need to succeed. Me and my 13 code delegates from Europe are missing many fellow colleagues here this week. And they are experts on issues where I would never dare to pretend to be able to represent them for their pressing issues. Because though youth is often seen as one, it is also a group with great diversity within. We all know this. In the future, I hope we will see more member states including youth delegates in their delegations to the HLDF. This will enable a broader participation on the follow-up and review of the SDGs. Young voices are also raised through the labels as the youth envoy and the major group for children with youth. That support young voices from civil society, giving them a platform to speak up. This reminds me that we still have a long way to go to secure the word meaningful in sentences with youth participation and inclusion. Pushing for meaningful youth participation seems to me more urgent than ever. As the Youth Solution Report outlines, institutional spaces for meaningful youth participation is needed for youth solutions to be a part of global policymaking. And the voice and solution of youth has to be included in order to realize the SDGs. We, the youth, are often told that we are the agents of change, that we are the generation who will fully implement the SDGs. And I would really like to agree, I would. I know that youth can do it, and you know as well. But it is unreasonable to believe that we will succeed with the 2030 agenda if the older generations, without hesitation, places the responsibility on the shoulders of the youth. Youth will take care of it, was a comment on last Friday's side event. Well, not if we don't have access to the negotiations and the decision making, that's for sure. In Denmark we see the frustration also in youth associations. They often times feel that the 2030 agenda is referred to as an individual responsibility of each young person rather than common obligation. Concerning SDG 12, where many Western countries underperform the individual lifestyles, we may very likely have better attitudes towards consumption. But in a whole, we need action on a political level. And youth wants to offer contributions to these actions. We in return would like partnerships with trust, common responsibility and reciprocity to succeed. I think this goes for youth all around the world. The Youth Solutions Report 2018 showcases youth solutions and projects that tend to lack visibility in the official policy dialogue. Yes, such projects contribute to achieving the SDGs, localizing the SDGs and increasing awareness of the SDGs. Not just among youth, but in the broader community. I know this from First Bank. When I was eight years ago, for the first time, I participated in the creation of a youth-led project. And creating a platform in Egypt between the British and Egypt youth parties across all spectrum. Getting together on projects that the older generations could never have between the cross-cultural and political platform for exchange and development. This leads me back to the word meaningful. And the reason to my is so important to always be a part of the discussion when we talk about youth participation. Allow me to contribute with a few examples of the Danish approach on a strategic and practical level. They're much stronger beliefs that youth are aging, ages of change, positive change. Young people are the leaders of tomorrow and crucial partners of today. To engage young people meaningfully is not only the right thing to do, it's also the way to reinforce the legitimacy and effectiveness of policies and implementation of the 2030 agenda. Our mantra in Denmark is development by and with youth, not only for youth. If we fail to give youth a voice and see that the decision-making processes, youth beyond people can be a break to economic and social development. Leading to increasing poverty, illegal migration, failed citizenship and social unrest. This can and has to be countered so that the large youth generation can act as an engine for progress instead. To succeed, we have to invest in young people's opportunities and work with them to create sustainable development. That might be very committed to walk the talk underneath the dinner. Allow me to give you a few examples to our approach. Through the Danish Youth Council, some of the Danish Development Corporation is allocated to Danish youth organizations. This to create partnerships with international youth organizations, designing, implementing and evaluating development projects themselves. Here we see Danish medical students working with Rwanda medical students on developing material for comprehensive education on sexual rights and health, which the government of Rwanda has decided to implement in the national school curriculum. In Tunisia, the Danish YMCA scouts and the Tunisian scouts have succeeded in developing democratic structures within the Tunisian scout movement, educating young leaders and promoting democratic citizenship, as well as strengthening young people's right to participate in decision-making progress in their local communities. We also have one of the Danish political youth wings partnering with the Symbaccan Youth NGO on a project called Messengers for Peace. These are all strong examples of how youth engagement should be with youth-to-youth partnerships. Thanks to the results of the projects, the partnerships develop strong and responsible young people with a solid trust in the world and the effects of intercultural partnerships. This report contributes to elaborate on the framework where youth all over the world are taking action on poverty, war, lack of opportunities, social exclusion, climate change and environmental pigmentation that are taking on young people worldwide. A framework that has existed long before the agreement of the Global Goals, where also I had many memories with young ages of change in the world. This report creates a common language to showcase and push forward the great examples of youth leadership. So my meeting with the Peaceburg activists really made an impact, made me reflect on the privileges that each of us have of being at these meetings and activities. And those of us who have a platform must insist on addressing our missing colleagues, whether it be the young people, LGBT plus community, indigenous people, disabled or young people, living on the islands that feel the consequences of our waste and climate change. The youth wants to passionately address the substance of the SDGs in review. But I know that I'm not speaking only on behalf of myself when I say that we will keep pushing for a more extensive and meaningful youth inclusion. The project showcased in the report, co-ordinates with my perception that my generation and the next to follow will keep redefining the meaning of personal fears, such as gender, sexuality and boundaries. And also adjust innovative, invasively to the fact that technology is taking our jobs, extreme opinions and actions are reestablishing all borders and the planet's resources are not unlimited. We are a generation that takes leadership in our own lives when we choose not only to consume differently, but also to consume less. The young generation are less at this, the agents of change, in not only creating awareness of sustainable lifestyle, but also demanding a future where decent jobs and innovation of thoughts lead the way. Where we are talking about ownership on decision making that regards our own lives. Recognition of youth as a key stakeholder, an expert, an ally in a sustainable development department. This report is an important brick in completing that agenda, so we can start talking about the problems that we must solve together. And for that, I truly appreciate it. Next speaker we have is Sam Lani. He is the Global Director of SDN Youth. He coordinates all the youth and student activities in the network, including the Local Pathways Fellowship, the Global Studies Program, the SDG Student Program and the Youth Solutions Community. Sam is also the Partnership Manager for SDN's New Financing for Sustainable Development Initiative, New Humanity, working health-coordinated efforts to mobilize global funding and resources to close the SDG financing gap. Please join me in welcoming Sam as he will provide insights into this year's report. Okay, thank you very much. It's an absolute pleasure being here and thanking everyone who has attended this event. So, my name is Sam Lani and I pointed out another global coordinator of SDN Youth. SDN Youth is the official youth program of the SDSN, which is initially launched by the four million sector general fund to move in 2012 to mobilize global expertise about the sustainable development of SDN's. I'm going to see if Professor Jenny Sacks, SD's special advisor, are on the sustainable development of SDN's. And I just heard about the role that Denmark has been playing in the SDG zone, the engagement of youth in particular. Who here can you tell me what's the 18th SDG? Anyone can tell me? There isn't one. There isn't one? Well, that's funny because Denmark disagrees with you. Because the government of Denmark has created another SDG as well as rather proposed number one, which is about youth empowerment. Because they see the important role that young people play in the implementation of the SDG zone. And I would like to commend Denmark on its efforts. And also the youth delegate program and the mission of UN. And I encourage you to continue those efforts because you will meet them. So Denmark is saying the example. Also, Denmark is ranked second on the recently released SDG index report. So that tells you something. And you're wondering what the west is? Who can tell you guess? So in SDG index, most recently, US is ranked 30th. Okay, and it is an absolute honor being here to launch the youth solution report. The second edition of it with all the partners and colleagues and the constituents of SDG and SDG. And a special thank you to Diary of the Centre as the project lead for this program. Who is not here, I think he's watching right now live from China. So I don't know where the live stream camera is. Yes, Diary. And also his wonderful team, including our colleagues, others who have helped put this report together. Which is that I've seen produced at the SDG index level in the past three years since I was watching. So let's get right to it then. Youth solutions report. So to start this presentation, I've desperately tried to condense in one slide the work of SDGs in youth and SDG in general. But basically this is something that has been produced by our colleagues in the ASA and the Stockholm Brazilian Centre. Which is the fundamental changes that need to be made in order to caught the planet on a sustainable development trajectory. These are the major transformations that we need to create in order to create a framework where we stay within the planetary boundaries. Or rather ecological limits. But also that we protect our economy in a way that is sustainable and helps the most vulnerable. But of course social inclusiveness and promoting peace and prosperity across the planet. So these are basically long-term strategies or pathways which basically point to public policies that need to change, innovation systems that need to change, the immobilization of public and private investments, new engineering and technology solutions, but also behavioral change and so on. So in 2015 the 17 SDGs were adopted to create a framework for the achievement of these major transformations. To safeguard the planet, to make sure that society is operating and being involved in a fair and prosperous manner. And also to ensure that we have a future generation that we so speak of. So basically the SDG assembly in 2012 was mobilized to help governments, UN agencies, businesses and other sectors to create actual road maps for these transformations. Because sure we all want to achieve this, we all need to achieve it in order to protect the planet and promote peace and prosperity and social inclusion and have a good global society. But it's going to be very difficult if we don't have a plan for it. And this is what the SDG send us. Helps different groups and organizations from different countries to create road maps for achieving the future. And of course as a part of that we offer education for sustainable development for the SDG youth and fulfill this mission. So SDSN Youth as I mentioned is the youth initiative of the SDSN. We're launching 20 big things, but in Paris. And we are now an organization or a network of 700 youth organizations, student associations from more 80 different countries around the world. We are in total about 140 staff and volunteers based in about 30 different countries and we also have 20 regional and national centers that we're operating out of. And now we're running major programs, entrepreneurship, education for sustainable development, mobilization in cities and communities and of course mobilization for SDG and anarchists to create solutions within the university sector. The approach that we take at SDSN Youth goes beyond what we usually see and repeat. So as a sort of mantra about young people being the leaders of the future. We hear that often, young people are the future. Yes, sure, but as my mental fitness is set, I don't like that quote because it implies that we're not part of the present. We are absolutely part of the present. And what we see is that young people are already extremely skilled and extremely aware of the challenges of sustainable development, their interactions and the complexity of finding meaningful solutions. In fact, we're seeing more social businesses started by young people than in other demographics of young people. We see youth donated to charities much more often and larger proportions and they tend to want to work in businesses that are working in social development to protect the environment and basically in businesses that are doing meaningful work. And in fact, there was a report or a survey produced by ISEC and the Office of the University of Queensland on Board of Youth in 2015 which asked young people, what kind of jobs do you want? What's very interesting is that they said they want jobs that are meaningful. So this is why SDSM youth focuses on women. Okay, so what is a youth solution? We talked about youth solutions, but I think it's important to identify. So young people today, regardless of their country of origin, have seen their lives shaped by consequences of short economic decisions, often made by someone else and witnessed the negative impacts of environmental degradation and unsustainable growth. So this is why they exited such a strong sense of purpose and a natural attitude towards linking the individual role in the global economy to the idea of working towards the role of a social group. And these are all the tens of youth solutions. So your business model, institutional mechanisms and public policies innovative forms of advocacy and educational programs, research and development of new technologies, of course social innovation. So the problem with youth solutions, we have many young people who are attempting to build solutions whether they're startups, whether they're nonprofits, whether they're campaigns but often they come across these issues. So we know that youths are great. Lack of access to capital and startup funding, lack of access to mentoring opportunities and business development services, lack of access to networks and opportunities to obtain disability and lack of share narrative and SDG online. So these innovations and solutions are everywhere from research and development spinoffs in big universities or new businesses carried out by educated young people that enter the job market and the impact of course is not on the economic. In fact, it goes beyond that but just to give you a little insight. So the ILO, the International Labour Organization, estimates that having big youth employment rate, for example, would add 4.4 trillion dollars, sorry, would add to seven percent of the global GDP, that's several trillion dollars. So imagine the impact of that. But also in terms of social and youth inclusion and transition from a state of dependence to one of self-sufficiency so basically creating a sense of belonging in young people would actually help generate attention towards sustainable development and the themes that SDGs present. But how do they do that? As mentioned, these are the fundamental challenges faced by young people. So in the existing landscape of SDG entrepreneurship, we can see that it's quite fragmented. We have different groups doing different things. So many provide innovation, training without funding and alignment. So it's very hard to also never acknowledge that happiness. Many provide funding, so there are pitch competition, innovation grants without training and alignment and failure to leverage funding. Some provide training and funding without alignment so failure to leverage social impact and finally not really provide a very holistic ecosystem or approach towards creating solutions for the sustainable world. So this is what we are trying to do at the SDS and youth and basically we, with the partners, are trying to create an ecosystem or rather a community where we are enabling all the important components that will create impact resources. And this is exactly where the youth solutions report 2018 is born out of. So it is fundamentally part of SDG's course strategy that focuses on young innovators and the potential to concretely contribute to the implementation of the SDGs. So our work is around acceleration and investment awareness programs to receive materials and tools to further develop their projects, connect young innovators to experts from all over the world, visibility and funding opportunities and see their impact on all SDGs, not only those with directed face management. So in the 2018 report on numbers, there were 200 projects submitted for consideration from 61 countries of origin where they innovated from and there are 50 projects that have been selected by a panel of 61 experts. So this doubt was very important because actually even though there are 61 countries of origin, there are in more than 100 countries of operation. So this is wonderful diversity to have and it has been fantastic to see such different solutions from so many different sectors. And of course, this is our advisory panel that you spend you to bring in the cattle, bring in your tail using the Vice President of the African Development Bank, Mr. Jaffa Shalchi, who is the CEO of the UNAC Foundation, Captain Barbara with the Virginia Biennale, Amanda Frischbohm from the UCN, Mr. Oliver Libby, Lauren Bereta, and of course, one of the second ones on the bottom, Anna Norton from SKSEN, Norton Europe, Susie Ibertson, Martin Mackell, Shelley Nossalin, Alexander Dale from the Mighty and the Soul, Sean Brown, Jennifer Cross from the SKSEN Association Council and last month's fellowship. A huge thank you to our panel who have submitted one of their projects and they will present different sectors, whether it's business, whether it's academia, whether it's the United Nations, civil society, or financially. So the 2018 report, so these are the map of the solutions that we see. It's quite diverse, but you will see a huge number of solutions that are coming out of parts of South South Africa and also in the South in India and then in Latin America. So this is wonderful to see because the diversity just shows interest within developing countries. So we can see that, for example, in India, Nigeria, and Kenya, and Uganda, there is such a huge interest. And we know that, for example, these are the societies where we'll have a leading group where majority of the population is one. So these are the top of four organizations that we have. So we have about 75 because of applications, 200 applications that we have. We have about 75 non-profits, about 56 for-profit companies or other social businesses. We have other involved organizations. Now, this also shows that, in a sense, the innovation that is adopted by a system is not only around technological innovation or business-oriented solutions, but also refers to a wide range of innovations in the non-profit sector as well as forms of social innovation. So these solutions have the potential to directly address some of the most profound gaps in SDG implementation, whether that's migration, lack of reliable and maternal and children health services, and social inclusion, and so forth. This also outlines the main activities, so whether there are social enterprise or starting technological development. This goes beyond the legal framework that they do. Educational programs, charity and volunteering, finance, as they show you the money. So I hear this quite often, and I think we've pointed to it as well, which is, often we hear that all of you in the next generation go and implement the SDGs. Of course, achieving SDGs is a multi-generation or inter-generation effort, but to do that, finance is necessary. And this is what many of the families in Europe are doing, but there's a problem with having to be able to actually implement projects on the road. This is a huge issue, and we know that we have a huge SDG financing gap, and with that money, it's very difficult to actually but also to scale up efforts. So this is why SDG financing is a core component. So, if we are serious about scaling and implementing the SDGs, so we must think about ways to be able to find them. And this is something we're actually working on in the SDGs, or we also need an ecosystem which is able then to access those funds and use them effectively on the ground. And this is what we hope to do. This is just a quick snapshot of SDG focus for solutions. As you can see, we have priority in this on the social world. So these are some examples of which, unfortunately, I won't have the time to go into the report. And of course, as mentioned, these are some of the challenges that have been identified or itself. Awareness and the craziness of sustainability, technological change, innovation, education, skills development. So just key takeaways from the actual report. First, we must have a long-term vision. So innovation prices, contributions to innovation initiatives in which young people present their solutions to local stakeholders and supporters are essential. But too often, these public or CSR initiatives are one-off, they're not continuous. So it's just not to be able to build that and make it a continuous one, which is also supported by funding programs, donors, multi-natural development agencies, private partnerships, which are specifically focused on new institutions. Secondly, we support the ecosystem, making sure that everything is integrated. So this is training programs, acceleration programs, initiatives that provide visibility. In other words, systems where investors, the public sector, academia, companies, all play a part. And thirdly, we need a multi-level approach. So cities and territories play a significant role in helping actually localize the solutions on the ground and help scale up. Fourth, we need to get out of the vague concept of social good and thinking in terms of SDGs, because with SDGs, we actually have a set framework where we can measure success, actually outline and do social mobilization, but also bring different sectors together. And this is critical for breaking those silos. Fifth, we must be rigorous in measuring, controlling and supporting. So this includes formal paths in which skills can be channeled, controlled and valued, and to be able to provide up people with those that are necessary to remain. Finally, the most important and preparatory dimension to all the others, we must act as governments, companies and investors, civil society and universities. We all need to begin to take risks and change the paradigm to get out of this, out of path dependence, out of business as usual and to recognize that if those skills are there, it's no sense to, it makes sense to harness them to invest in them and to take responsibility. There is incredible untapped potential in the three and a half billion young people who are under the age of 30. And if we are to invest in these young people, I think many of them would surprise us. So let's take that approach and actually work together to support ecosystems where the creativity, the idealism and the numbers of young people matched with the financial capacity and experience and expertise of all the generations can come to that square we could actually get and we've seen it in every single major social and economic transformation. We didn't have just one sector that had new generations supported by expertise financial capacity of the other coming forward across multiple sectors to work on common problems. That's how we did the transformation. And we hope that through this report we can highlight these examples and celebrate the wonderful work that these young people have done and also continue to build this ecosystem with our wonderful work. Any young person who has a good idea wants to make an impact whether it's in social or in business access what they need. And then next, we'll have a panel discussion on how we can support youth innovators on access to funding and during invisibility. First up, we'll have Alex Clark he is the Senior Project Advisor for SDSN Youth and he will discuss topics on youth access to funding. So, I'm one of the authors of a chapter in the institutional report looking at specifically access to funding. I'm currently an analyst at the Climate Policy Institute in San Francisco working with SDSN about two and a half years now right from the start it's really quite amazing to see what has been achieved in that time. So, it's a privilege to be part of it. So, me and a couple of others spent some time trying to understand the issues with these financing from both the demand side perspective what's being asked for and what's actually being provided bringing those together to understand where we should go next. So, the UN General Assembly in this resolution adopting the SDGs characterised in these critical actions have changed but since then we've seen relatively different background. As has been mentioned, youth are a significant portion of the world's population and will continue to grow in particular interest in this report. And there's a clear untap potential for implementation of the SDGs. Moreover, the economic opportunity for realising the SDGs has been estimated between 25 and 35 trillion dollars which at least 12 trillion will go directly to the private sector. So, there's not only economic and social benefits according to governments but also to all companies and organisations. Sorry, this is a little small but when we started out with this project we tried to sort of categorise more or less what the barriers that youth entrepreneurs are facing and broke them up into the following five. Legal and regulatory issues I'm very much taking into registration costs of businesses or other regulatory landscapes and issues with trust in the regulatory landscape which in a lot of the countries where this is most relevant is either unstable or corrupt. Access to finance is safe the education and skills are required to understand how to go about entrepreneurship. Awareness of networking, not just linking entrepreneurs to potential financers but also to others within their network and how to support their work. And then finally, the data and technology tools which can so quickly and rapidly accelerate the development of sustainable solutions. So, we've already seen some of these data presented in sound presentation. Access to finance really does stand out. The primary issue that basically the applicants or those who submitted solutions to this year before and some quite a few of the other areas that are identified here are actually very closely linked to it particularly the risky technology exchange and innovation. So, what is the financing challenge for young? There's a need to meet operating costs and administrative expenses right at the beginning which usually relies on grants or family support or even voluntary work for labour. Banks, commercial banks in the area typically see you as attractive business prospects which makes sense, they have no collateral, they have no credit history no credit history to draw on low-saving rates and chronic insecurity over income. And then finally even for those organisations that are successful in a family funding or at least know where to get it the administrative burden that constantly needs to be applied to grants and the pletid wrong of the organisation to have very generous requirements in terms of demonstrating how funds are going to be used can really tie other sources that need to be used in product design, market testing all the other elements that produce successful business. So, there's a real bind here. What are the sources of finance that young SDG innovators have access to currently? Well, they're very limited for a start but we've categorised them sort of three main buckets which are the kind of traditional source of finance for for ventures, particularly the developing world around sustainable learning, not necessarily seen as viable commercially or otherwise and typically use public capital grants from foundation sources to with no view to the kind of eventual commercial vibrancy that's something that really needs to change and the area of blended finance using smaller pieces of public finance to take on enough risks of private sector can actually get involved is a real growing trend, particularly in the energy space which has real potential to scale up innovation. Commercial banks Impact Investors and Venture Capital all have plenty of cash hanging around but they really lack currently the pipeline of projects in which we deploy it. Alternative finance is a pretty exciting area right now but this application specifically Increasingly, peer lending and financial technology solutions are subject to increased compliance restrictions, the government starts to wake up to some of the risks of unregulated peer lending but even so it's starting to become an important source of at least start-up financing for these sort of ventures and just where are your time I think I'll speak through this we're seeing a significant focus on more of the socially oriented aspects of the STG particularly economic growth education health and well-being this is an interesting finding because while these are critically important it was very difficult to make financially sustainable even as a non-profit organization so we'll need to do some very serious thinking about how how we'll actually realise how it's something to problem I just want to highlight quickly when we asked applicants to identify their current source fundings running close behind what you might expect as an answer grants is crowdfunding and so we decided to just hit close to look at it so it's the second most cited source of funding and interestingly even in 2015 to three years ago 34 billion dollars was raised globally and for youth entrepreneurs in particular while crowdfunding is not going to necessarily provide the solid basis that needs to scale the operations it can be a really useful tool for market validation understanding whom the earlier doctors did their product might be and gather initial feedback so they can improve their product enough to be able to then go to more serious financing sources like banks or venture capital to make a much stronger case the cost of capital are still relatively high compared to standard bank loan but based with the fact that most youth entrepreneurs simply do not have access to bank loans for the reasons I noted earlier crowdfunding does seem like a good option so there's a box on this in the report which I'm approaching to read with details and then finally SDSN and my association SDSN Youth has a phenomenally strong network across the world associated with institutions that do have expertise and capacity to bridge one of these gaps so this has been a very interesting research project but it will come to very little and that's why it was actually implemented so I hope you enjoy reading the chapter please do get in touch if you've got any thoughts about how we might really bring this into action in the meantime that's exactly what we're going to be focusing on because thank you very much Thank you Alex and thank you for your contribution to the research and report on Albert he's actually one of this kind of innovative speech just a reminder to the panel in sentence so we can all have a good one So I'll give you a pretty informal kind of introduction to what our solution is why we think it matters and why we're in a grateful big picture in our report this year three years ago I was a senior in a state college job in North Carolina and really saw how disconnected education is from the workforce in a really very rural way it was my last year going through the public education system I was a grade school kid all the way through university and had always viewed education as kind of a lifeline that would take you from one and realize pretty soon as I saw people graduating going into the workforce that isn't necessarily the case anymore that our schools are really struggling to give people the skills the experience, the exposure that they need to find early career success and this is particularly difficult for people from working class backgrounds at state colleges who aren't necessarily competitive but are well connected enough to make those connections so from that point I designed Impact Eddon which is basically a bridge to connect the classroom with the rural world so we bring rural projects related to SDGs into classrooms across the study launched last fall with projects of NASA the only rare H&M had engineering students who had never taken a STEM class before in the last ten weeks were able to design a space mission that could monitor biodiversity so we're really kind of trying to operationalize learning by doing in a way that can reach students where they need that education the most and might not have the chance to make those creative sparks or make those connections and we've really seen we've reached 500 students in our first year and have seen a great amount of impact for a small coalition and seen that when you give students who haven't necessarily had the opportunity to solve a pressing challenge in geography or for a leading employer in the field they light up and they come alive in ways that their education hasn't necessarily given them so we've had plastic students at University of Delaware the teacher reported at the work she said almost every student in our class have a job light up before they graduate most of them said that they talked about their experience really powerful kind of full circle moment for me at the time when I disbarfed a couple years back and made the solution come to life for each state college students and actually had that outcome happen was really exciting in the United States I'm not sure about the folks it's just that about 44% of college graduates between the ages of 20 to the 27 under employed in other countries who have this moment is actually more severe and this creates some rest and lots of other problems that we're seeing socially and ethnically even politically and so we hope that if we can help the university system modernize their approach to teaching to where we're teaching students the skills giving them the experiences that actually prepare them early for success and do so in a way that connects them to challenges that matter so not just balancing spreadsheets but solving sustainable problems then we can really change the direction of those are facing so we kind of use a mantra that was first and then 2000 years ago when Confucius said I hear and I forget I see and I remember and that's still true today but change to keep up with the times the age of people so we're trying to figure out how to make that happen and really grateful to the solutions we've worked with a number of students and she presented her solution and my name today my name is Jessica Anderson I'm from the United Nations as well as the current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Local Schools Network NYA today is starting as an idea that I have after reading numerous articles about injustice that was manifesting in my own backyard and they were really occurring on a global scale in a way that I truly could the only thing that I knew was the fact that I wanted to teach exactly what NYA today is doing is a solution based journalism network, volume for youth and we truly allow youth and every opportunity to take action so with every single article that we write at the bottom of that article are ways that you can take action are ways that you can make a change and that's what we're doing and that's how we hope to implement SDGs in a number of ways in non-sensual quality education so we've done several different initiatives including Humanitarian International which is a partnership with UNICEF USA as well as some other organizations including Unchained at Last and this works to amplify the youth voice to address crises that were otherwise deemed unsolvable so that could be Yemen, that could be Afghanistan, that could be even the USA because unfortunately we do have a number of crises that are happening in our government at this time so we really are making sure that youth not only recognize the fact that their education can be used to empower others, we are making sure that our content educates, engages and empowers. Thank you. And I'm happy to be out here next up we have Emma Yang she is the founder of Timeless which is a mobile app aimed at improving the lives of those with Alzheimer's Next year is old, one day my dad is going to appear and she'll do this crash with a tool that helps kids to learn how to code, why we've kind of been striving about blocks that you can put together in conditions and games and that is what we've got along with it I was amazed by the extraordinary range of things we created it didn't matter whether it was a game or a tool or any other application it was simple or complex, it was my own personal creation, especially a unique thing to show in the rest of the world so this will motivate me to keep learning how to code old apps and websites so in the summer of 2015 I participated in some information challenge which was technology entrepreneurship competition for girls so with the competition I had to develop an app and create a business app was my spring warm technology I realized that even though I lived at the time 11 years old I could create products with meaningful functionalities that could help people all around the world so this is my grandmother who spent a lot of her life raising me and spending a lot of time with me when I was 7 or 8 years old I thought I should just think about what to get for her but then she forgot how old I was which she just sent for dinner and later on she lost her time and got where she was which is all of the common difficulties faced to Alzheimer's patients so to help her we put out these visual aids from the conference we put out a white glass where we can set up room because what we saw was that in the research shows that using a computer or an app to make it flow to actually help to slow down how people define so that one has an extensive way to find an app that like that that we were shown to exist but we came away disappointed because in fact we didn't there are a lot of tools in the market that are built towards Alzheimer's space that no one would decide to help so I should put that into my other hands because to create a timeless timeless is of course to this kind of caregiver system or whole app that uses artificial intelligence based patient recognition technology to help Alzheimer's patients recognize people around them as well as you know the events and stages so updates it's where the patient can look at photos set up around the events that each of those photos are tagged for the game and in which situation there's also today the agenda of daily events and weather information contact which is particularly high which is the artificial intelligence to what patients need to use the camera to take a picture of a face so over the time I've been working in this research about a year and a half now it comes into this huge model of life press coverage in less sustained to Mexico and Malaysia and as the widely shared on social media our demo video actually I've been with a lot of feedback from students and I actually got to with the production of my old gates earlier this year which is really great there's nothing more about it and also that I found when I was camping I was going to run funds for raise funds for the project and I reduced over $10,000 in March I was won the $50,000 grand prize below the context start-up challenge and not only was it amazing to be recognized as a fortunate young founder but among all those people a young founder was recognized and given the opportunity to show the world if she can and so because of this prize time we've actually now a fully funded and officially incorporated start-up so some initial challenges I faced when I first started this project were things like getting one game and access to excellent support so when I first started that asking can you give me a sense of support on this project so when I went to these people and asked whether we could be funding a lot of the time this was a really vital idea that we could actually give it to a company I emailed a lot of experts in the field like doctors and technology experts and all of them I wanted to get and so now that I've gone through a lot of hard work for assistance in time with a lot being able to find new advisors for my projects who are supporting me and guiding me through working this out and eventually to launch later this summer and so now, since the launch I've been trying to work on these challenges so awareness access to users and adoption not being trying to reach out to great conceptors to have the app implemented to their studies and to use notifications so my call to all of you is, you know, if you are able to meet or produce these young founders please offer your support if you get a email from someone please, you know, a simple reply or pointing in the right direction I mean so much to us Next up we have George Sadist he is the CEO and co-founder of the Reservation Project and I just want to remind everybody if they could speak into the microphone and then have some difficulty here Thanks so much I always wondered at what point they'd be like I'm the old guy in the room now Thanks everyone In all seriousness you know, every time I get to work with young founders like the ones you've been listening to every day and when people ask me why did we start up the Resolution Project and I'll get to that in a second but when they ask me, you know, why did you do that they said, well it just seemed that we were missing out as a world, as a society if young people want to do something good they want to dedicate their life, their time their work to social impact if we don't get behind them and support them to do that shame on us imagine what it looks like when somebody has a career of impact that starts at 20 versus one that starts at 50 what you can do over that additional generation focused on creating value for everyone is transformative and if we're going to try to hit some of these goals that are targeting 2030 if we're going to try to set this world on a sustainable course it's going to take getting that really, really generations of impact and that's what inspires me about everybody in this report and some of the people you're talking to you're hearing from right now in terms of Resolution we fund, mentor and support undergraduates who are starting social enterprises around the world we have about 400 fellows in 73 countries who started about 250 social enterprises over one and a half million people with their work the concept of ecosystems and SDGs is always really interesting for us I'll start with the SDGs so we are a goal 17 organization that is the only goal that we as an organization are focused on anybody know what 17 is about? partnerships exactly right the reason for that is very simple if we build partnerships between the people that are doing work in this space the rest of it will take care of itself we think that's overly simplistic but everyone is drawn to the issue that is in front of them the issue that's in their backyard and we want to activate young people to take on those issues that they see and those that they're closest to my grandmother also I lost her a few years ago so obviously when you bring that up to me that's really important but if I just focus on that issue there would be no one to answer your emails or try to connect you with others so the real work that I see that as as institutions as organizations, as individuals that have access to experts, expertise, capacity funding the biggest contribution we can make is to that ecosystem built in portion now ecosystem this idea of a large holistic, complete ecosystem I fear is going to be forever receding but what we can do that is very tangible and it does create a whole lot of support is to reach out to people on either side of us the folks that are close to us that are near to us in proximity so if we give out $5,000 of funding we should be looking for the people to give out $10,000 to $15,000 of funding and the folks that should be looking for us are the those that give out $1,000 or who give a lot of feedback on a pitch or an idea and if we start to link arms in that way while it may never be this perfect map of where everybody falls in the ecosystem that can be solved by technology but if we are all connected in those ways that's going to be a much more powerful network and it's going to allow these young social entrepreneurs, these change makers in their communities to create a lot more change and go a lot faster Thank you George Next I'd like to invite up Anna She's a CEO and a co-founder of Transparency Hi everyone I definitely can't talk to you, that was amazing It just like sat down and was like she's 14 125 Okay so Transparency is focused on the problem of food waste which is a problem that has been around for longer than I have for longer than George has but it's a problem that we frequently tend to ignore but it's one that's been around for so long and has shifted away from it to a certain extent So the food that we tackle is the stream of food waste that traditional food rescue cannot reach fast enough So how many of you have ever been to or hosted an event where there's been a ton of extra food and you haven't really known what to do with it I know you all have but the food waste that Transparency tackles is the food that needs to be picked up immediately and eaten by someone immediately I had experience when I started college here like I'm from Pakistan but when I came here to start college I joined the class activities board and our job was to host events for the entire incoming class of NYU and obviously if 200 people for these events 10 would show up because it's a university event and no one comes to these but naturally we would order food for 200 people so at the end of the night what would happen was that the people hosting the event would be stuck with 180 extra meals and nothing to do with it if you try to call traditional food rescue they will not come because it's 11pm and the food is probably perishable and it has to be packaged a certain way it's not at the right temperature if you try to take it yourself what if it spills in the uber like where do I even take it these are all very valid questions and so when we talk about food rescue we focus on the non perishables the grocery stores, the stuff that's packaged all of this prepared food like imagine there are we hit about 50 places a day and each of these there are small tech offices that host that have catering for lunch or their weddings and things like that things that you don't really expect to have extra from but end up having a ton and so what we did was we wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to donate and also as much of a hassle to eat yourself as it is getting someone else to take it for you and so we built an app that works the best way to explain it is uber for extra food where in the same way a passenger schedules a ride a food donor can schedule a pickup we surprisingly don't have as much trouble with the financing because we started charging for pickups realizing that donors were receiving a massive tax write off for all the food that they were donating so we wanted to create a sort of shared value model where you're not doing this because it's so like you are doing it because it's the right thing to do but you're not only doing it because it's the right thing to do relying on goodwill to solve a problem like food waste we realized wasn't going to take us very far because people care but the problem isn't going to be solved just in care and you need to create a model where people are actually getting something out of participating so we've been working for this was my first job out of college we've been working for about two years now and we've done over 480,000 pounds of food purely from places that traditional food rescue does not pick up from so there's a lot of them challenges wise I suppose it's getting people to or creating a model that provides value for everyone that's involved so that's the person transporting the food it's the person donating the food it's not only the person receiving it because we're only focusing on the receiver we're not breaking out of this very traditional way that we've seen charity which is there's a giver and a taker and the relationship is purely between these two these two parties but I feel like in order to create lasting models that you can step away from and you're still going to move forward you have to create a model that provides value for everyone involved so that they can't continue okay thank you Hena next up we have Sharon Lowe co-founder and co-president of Global Youth Management I'm the co-founder and president of the Global Youth Management Ministry we're a non-profit that focuses on SPG4 do we know what it is? education education we work with underserved youths to become independent learners and socially responsible leaders through long-term one-on-one person support and the curriculum focuses on social emotional learning and critical thinking skills so in the simpler term we help increase their EQ and social skills to help them to see longer-term in the time that I'll share about my venture so far right now if you're interested in learning more particularly mental health issue and education for left-behind children children on move-vibrant students around the world and particularly China but today with the United Nations being named multiple times I would also like to use this opportunity to put on my UN hat and share a little bit of what I know about how UN is making effort to engage many of these issues so last year I had the honor to become the youth representative for actually a residential project in the UN Department of Public Information on PPI for short this year I was elected into the youth representative steering committee program which oversees the ACAR youth representative program for all non-profits associated with active software of PPI this is a venture launched in 66th United Nations PPI NGO conference in Korea in effort to increase engagement around UN if more access to people to the age of 8 to 32 to have a voice to speak about their issues, their concerns with the UN system so this year I'm actually the culture for the youth subcommittee for 67 UN PPI NGO conference happening actually this August 22nd 23rd here right here at ACAR and we are hosting two days events on the work of involved youth for example we have youth caucus every day in the morning from 840 to 940 940 and we will invite the SGE to speak to youth. We also have youth taking place alongside the the agenda to focus particularly on the issues that youth have voted to be their top concerns around the world so I encourage everyone particularly those who work closely with youth to check it out it's on the UN PPI NGO website and we are rolling out a survey to ask for an info what you want to see, what's the topic you want to discuss or if you have any activities or proof that youth is today's solution can help solve this problem together into our exhibition exhibition on the Peace Hub exhibition table pretty early as the end I don't know if your physical coffee will be ready at that but I would really encourage you to display proof that we have you today's solution at the conference this year. Thank you Thank you Sherman and for that one at least we have everyone it's so great to be here I've been in the quarters of the UN HQ for the last week in the kind of formal review of the STGs at the HLPS and while that's incredibly important it's much more exciting to be hearing about what youth are doing and how they're getting engaged so as I mentioned I run an initiative in Geneva called the 2030 Ecosystem which is kind of a network of entities who are focused on their connections between each other in the sustainable ecosystem in order to enhance the way they deliver the STGs and I know we've talked about ecosystems a few times but it's really about how we think about the connections between and the space between the goals in order to have them move quicker and and further and then I was contacted to the UN office of Geneva in the STG lab which also works on that same premise and I'm an NGO in that team I know kind of what I do with my day job but I also happen to be a co-founder of one of the solutions that was featured last year in the solutions report called Student Energy I am now 30 so I'm kind of approaching the end of my youth but I think youth is a frame of mind and in addition to that I started working on Student Energy when I was 20 first as a volunteer and when I was going to university and then it was my job by the time I was 24 when I ran for three years and then passed it off to the next generation and now serve as the board chair so what I want to talk to you a little bit about today is how I've kind of learned from being a youth social entrepreneur and what I've kind of seen as working because I think in challenges we're talking about today there are solutions to them and some of it absolutely has to do with driving more finance but it also is very integrated so the first thing I'll say is that I'm a huge proponent of intergenerational equity and collaboration I started as a social entrepreneur when I was 19 or 20 and I always felt that the kind of enthusiasm energy, passion and naivety but in a good way naivety the ability to take risks the ability to not kind of overthink things and have analysis paralysis was wonderfully paired with people who had a lot of experience and so I've always been a big proponent of melding those two when student energy started we saw more as creating space for youth to talk about issues that mattered and what student energy does focuses on how we engage youth in the energy transition and climate change issues but at over time we really narrowed in on our period of change and there was two main things that we realized that we were doing that were crucially important this was not kind of planned in advance the first was empowering young leaders we talked a lot about that what do you mean to be successful financing mentorship and a whole bunch of things we break it down into four categories we think that youth need knowledge very practical knowledge skills whether that be in order to gain financing or proper legal structures but also just actual skills on how you build a business people always ask me what I needed when we first started student energy leadership training or coaching it was how do you build a website how do you sales force for you I get an accountant those types of things that are actually very practical and sometimes get overlooked and then the values piece the reason we started student energy is because I went to business school and I started working in the energy industry and I wanted to change the energy industry and I went to business school with a lot of other people who went in wanting to change the industry and you know a really cushy job and kind of move their way up and then those kind of values just disappear and my goal and my co-founder's goal and everyone in the network is to make sure that that doesn't happen to really instill those values deeply at a time when it matters and we believe that's in post-secondary education but it can be through many stages of life and in even earlier years and then finally to have a network because it is much easier to build something when you have a group of people and that holds those same values as you hold and can help you get those skills so that's what I would say around empowering youth that's really what student energy focuses on but there's this other bucket that I think is also fundamentally important and that's what we call creating space for youth to act and that's working with established institutions to create that space and maybe it was brought in a meaningful way so it's not just about kind of about being a token youth council or you know state-of-the-art token major group statement that's read out although those are incredibly important it was very evident in the HLPM this week that there were very few youth voices on the actual panels or as discussants actually creating that meaningful space act is incredibly important and it's very hard to do so we work a lot particularly with big energy institutions foundations, the government for youth to have their voice heard and then I just wanted to kind of talk a little bit about the challenges that youth face and how they're integrated because when we started the idea of funding was of course the biggest challenge that we faced as has been mentioned time and time again today but what we didn't realize at the beginning was that funding is a chicken and the egg scenario with credibility so when we were going to funders and asking for $100,000 $200,000 checks we were 19 years old and that was a pretty big jump to get over a week to get over so partnerships became incredibly important in doing that we partnered with university who could have financial oversight and assurance so that we could assure those funders that we were a safe bet we invested heavily in our web presence and what it looked like which sounds like a small thing but when you look like Apple online people trust you more and so I do think that there are creative solutions as well some of these funding challenges that have to do with how we build your network and how you partner and how you create credibility and I'm incredibly willing to help new social entrepreneurs to do that because we've learned a lot over the course of the last 10 years in how you make that happen and then the last thing I would say is we've founded student energy before the SDGs existed we were president of the Rio Plus 20 where the idea started to spark we've seen them throughout and what I would say is you intrinsically and many people actually also since intrinsically know that these things are important I think sometimes where we fall down into our languages between these various dimensions so it's been brought up several times that a lot of the focus has been on the social dimensions of the SDGs but I think it's really important that we also consider how they're integrated and we went through this as well as student energy we started with extremely energy climate focus but over time we realized the importance of human rights and also economic empowerment in achieving what we want to achieve and we realized that incentive structures cannot be broken unless they're hit at the core so I really just encourage all of you when you're thinking about the SDGs to of course where you're one where you have expertise proudly but always think about the space between those goals and where it's connected thank you thank you ladies who all are panelists who presented I'd now like to invite you all up here for the last 25 minutes we'd like to open it up to the audience this is definitely the biggest panel massive I think half of the room is empty and the panel will go up one day okay great thank you for all those wonderful presentations so I'll be moderating this panel and this is just a real opportunity to actually dive deep into the issues that were discussed but also to ask questions, clarifications and for this to be a really open discussion but before that I believe there is an event that our colleague Patrick would like to announce which is happening tomorrow so there's a side event HLPF that we're organizing with the Irish mission it's basically about digital innovation or digital governance and we are the IMF are using sort of tools for tax collection but what they're trying to do is create a physical space so people can actually spend money on health and education and also we have our own project looking at how we can enhance stakeholder engagement in sort of HLPF but also at national level we do have STD Academy and we have UNDESIR presenting how we can provide intelligence how we can do policy mappings how we can actually help governments take a more hold of those and most importantly we're showcasing the results here but we'll put a flyer it's in a graveyard session so it's out half past six to eight o'clock at the end of the day at the end of the ministerial segments I'm sure they're all going into the airport but we'll do our best to try and fill the trustee's chain so it's on Wednesday it's alright yep so it's six to eight Wednesday six to eight Wednesday HLPF Justiceship Council good George, I don't know if you know this but I was actually a resolution I looked at it in 2011 so global health solutions good times yeah that's right okay great questions, comments from the University College children a question for Alex I found your presentation very interesting I was just wondering what you thought about the new SDG bonds and the test rules that they might play in funding a few solutions in projects in the future thanks very much for the question so again just a little bit of background the whole idea of the SDG bonds is essentially early large scale by the instrument that you can purchase and you'll receive passwords over time that are linked to the underlying products similar to green bonds which have been around for a while it's certainly promising but the big issue that we've come up come up against time and time again so I just get asked who are able to bring together hundreds of projects an algorithm that's big enough for the investors to actually sit down and get the same issue as true of green bonds and while large scale SDG projects are around within the use space there's a sort of problem there's so many very small and very disparate things together geographically sectorally so that would be a long term goal I think if we're able to establish enough credibility in youth back ventures that they're actually able to to talk to investors on that sort of level then perhaps we'll give you some but I think we still have a way to go thanks for bringing it up Hi my name is Aizhan I'm a student at the SDSN youth so I have a question to everyone the project that you're working on do you think that the traditional education impacted to the formation of your ideas or it's something external was it extracurricular or was it the society was it a YouTube talk or something like that that inspired you to pursue what you're doing Good question I do hundreds of students about what either make them want to kind of change the energy industry or start their own company or their own NGO and it's a range what the number one one reason we've heard is one person like one class or one mentor or one boss something that kind of really sparked a passion within a young person and so we actually spent a lot of time thinking about how do you create more of those moments that could potentially happen for me personally it was a combination of many things I think the school I went to in the education I had had a very extracurricular kind of vibe to it when people were heavily engaged and it was a good place to start new things and they still managed to do it anyway so I do think it's a combination but I think it often comes down to kind of very salient moments for people so I think we have to consider that in a way we create education systems and particularly how we choose people who engage with you so for me it was more of a collective an awareness of what was actually occurring in our work because typically I just turned 18 so many of my friends saw the news as something that was depressing and something that would ultimately be something they didn't want to listen to something they didn't want to turn on the TV for I wanted to change that to make news be empowering so that youth no longer felt like if you turn on the TV and you see something happening in perhaps giving your own state that you would otherwise know so you can't do something about now you know that you can do something about it because no matter how large scale the crisis is one voice, your voice will change and that's something I wanted to instill in all youth unfortunately we had a fairly large impact it started with only a few viewers per month and now we regularly reach over 100,000 youth from everywhere from Monterey to Mexico to across the United States and that's something that is really that inter-connectivity that allows people and all youth from all backgrounds to come together to engage and to be excited about learning and learning specifically about the news and the thing you do about something that you know is something that can I just confirm is the subtext for your question are you sort of asking is a post-secondary education, traditional post-secondary education worth it is that sort of the subtext of it so I couldn't have done what I did without my university experience without the people that I was around in university without the conversations that we had there's so many different types of learning that take place there's a lot of learning in the classroom and that's one type but there's also so much that you learn from your peers and when you're in an environment where where education is is valued where learning and growth are valued that's a good thing I think the the gaps that I saw even within that system that were the ones that I was hoping to target with my work were I still saw a lot of fear of failure which actually inhibits the learning process in a really big way you know sort of what all of my biggest learning experiences have come through failures massive embarrassing failures and the lessons that I've learned in those situations have applied to way more and come out with much better outcomes as a result but so there was that gap that I thought was significant and I thought the second gap that I was concerned with was um the continued deferral of action that once you're in sort of a four-year cycle or two-year cycle or whatever you're learning academic cycles could be a 10-year cycle if you're on your PhD track there's the idea that everything needs to wait until that's and I think that's a little flawed for a few reasons the first of which is it's not binary you don't have to stop school necessarily start a new project and it also will lead you towards avenues that have been predefined roads that are already there and that means that you're just going to repeat what people have to do done which in some cases can be great but in many cases there's a lot to be explored and that's so for me it was about breaking down some of those binary decisions that were presented to me as binary that really weren't and finding the space to explore that and also and sorry empowering other people to travel down that path as well and also taking more risks and being ready for the work so my life when it actually came as a result of that, during my senior year I was going through the job search at the same time as a lot of my classmates and had a job and I felt very good about how things were going to end up that way but that seems to be a future that went a lot more scary and was trying to understand what that was and look back to my college experience and understood that the types of work that really developed me in a way that was putting me on the path to be successful in my career or build all sorts of leadership or research learning or projects that I took on and those are experiences that a lot of students don't have schools often give the excuse of yeah we can't teach skills or we can't do x, y, z but as soon as you say the internships most don't have quality and so I think what I've been on the journey over the past few years figure out how to turn those experiences into pedagogies that can be taken to mass populations of students so if we look at project-based learning it's 10 times more effective than the learning that takes place in classrooms today in the past few centuries so how can we kind of recreate those experiences in a way that those light bulbs are going to go off the system that pushes them to the next and it was mentioned earlier from the delegate from Norway who said that each representation is still about you and not with me and I think that's something that's really convenient is how do I take the privilege that's taken me from rural Carolina to be able to be on a situation like this and make sure that that balance happens kind of across the board for young people and hopefully it happens in this generation we'll see I think our education system needs to adapt a little bit more before those sparks can fly yes my name is Yilac Diaz I'm the Executive Director of Liter of Light which was last year's winner but this year we entered and we won again for another one but I just wanted to you have to be a serial crazy person very unique perspective of our growth because we come from the Asia model but there are two grants that might be interesting for you guys that having this SDSN used winning one is that one of the largest and I think historically maybe once in your lifetime in my lifetime it's a four billion dollar investment for Dubai World Expo and the last grant application is this August it's called World Expo Expo 2020 Live Grant and it's for a hundred thousand US dollars they don't care afterwards what you do with it they just trust you with it and there's one it's Emirates money and there's one called Zayed Future Energy Price also closing first week of August $1.5 million for so on this one when you look at the UAE they're giving grants for sustainability and it's a lot of money really a lot of money I think we honestly use the brand that we won with the SDSN used has really given us a good rubber stamping to be able to win the grant so those are the two things that are going to finish in the next two weeks you might not see again the expo grant it's the last grant of the UAE for entering the expo which another thing is in two years you will have 40 million people going to your booth so you're going to be the first placement in the expo that means the entrance to the expo is where the 50 solutions are going to be placed so you get the first crack at 40 million people going sorry 40 million people going inside and of course the Zayed Future Energy Prize or just the Future Sustainability Prize where I think a lot of you can have a good show that's my point so use the breath Thank you very much I'm very happy to hear that association last year has helped you but also just I was actually about to call on you because from last year's working here just to give context is the co-founder of Liter of Light which are basically I don't know about the exact numbers but it was several thousand the last one we spoke of which was in 2016 it was several thousand houses that you were able to light its solid energy in 2016 so we're about three and a half years old in 2016 we were doing six countries we were doing I think 200,000 houses a year we're doing now close to 700,000 a year in 20 countries and the best thing there is it's replicable technology that the community itself takes over in the social enterprise so we don't control the patent and we just found out that people can make solar lights dependably with local parts parts and local community so yeah we've grown but with the power we were really inspired because we were trying to grow with the power of sales like selling the product and when we won the SDSN youth we said wait a minute why don't we make the youth so I have 2,700 youth members and when we started out with SDSN youth we never really thought about it because we were using women cooperatives and so it was really a groundbreaking thing to involve this army of young people as part of the solving energy poverty okay any more questions and comments yes it's always great to know new grants, thank you for that one thing that we've seen is that youth actually tend to be incredibly resourceful and the amount of funding required or just that can get things on the ground would be pretty small when we were starting 6 months because we were doing it kind of after work probably spent less than $5,000 and that was in the developed world, we have a number of students who have told us that very small size grants can help to just at least get going and then it was actually $25,000 grants that allowed for me to leave my job or at least give the push to start on that path so one of the things I do missing in the space is the proper size like you was mentioned about green and CG bonds I'm working with a lot of impact investors right now in Geneva and the price things or the dollar amounts are just $20 or $30 million is where they start in terms of impact investing because of the diligence and the process so I think it's just a mismanagement microfinance is stepping in particularly in the developing world but I think it is this kind of ticket size problem and then the youth focus and then just another word on failure I couldn't agree more about the importance of failure and I think also this comes, it links to funding because unless we could start talking about failure in the funding context we're in trouble, I recently submitted a failure report to one of my funders who was a development agency it was the first time I'd ever seen it and we did it as a draft because we were a bit concerned that they would be like no we're not passing that up to our higher ups but they did like it and my boss said well we could change the name like lessons learned report no it's a failure report this is where things didn't work and so I think that's a culture thing that we all have to work on actually my question is to the 14 year old I'm 51 well anyway so in 2015 I was one of the scientists of what's called the global sustainable development report and we're doing a kind of a pilot there it's coming out in 2019 and the team was to get science innovation and technology you know orientated to the SDGs but they put one caveat for that report which it has to be linked to leaving on behind so I have to I have to be science technology innovation but reaching out to the course of the board or the neediest of the neediest or the minority groups or whatever you want to think about it right and the thing that came to me during that report actually came out in your presentation as well which was there is a lot of existing sort of knowledge and experts and technologies and ideas that are being used or whatever you know out there but they're not necessarily been created to address something like your grandmother for example I was on Simon's disease because from a business point of view it's a minority group it's not the big market it's not going to have sales for 10-15 years you know so as a business model to do R&D to focus it's not great but obviously on the other hand as you're showing the expertise and knowledge is there to fix that problem and it's very very worthwhile now for me because I'm a European I really feel that this means there has to be state intervention like if this is a product or service for that type it cannot be just private finance it has to be a mixture of public private finance for that kind of I'm just kind of thinking whether when you're thinking about engineering money and it's a question to Alex as well whether trying to get money for that type of project into a health service what way is that really financed like what are the drugs that target these type of groups how are they really financed who really puts the money behind distribution of these products and these goods because if you start thinking that way you might get a big solution to how do you actually get that scale yeah thanks for your question yeah I think it's one of the three things that people like doctors and experts in technology feel that they have solutions that are on a scale that are really entirely for profit I think my experience in the past has been evolution of disease and this combination of long time is a great idea but this isn't going to get as long money as last for very long and so I think that's where in some ways the youth can start because we don't it's not a job for us we kind of are there for learning experience in the creative in the creativity part of it and that's why people like me are kind of positioned to be some of these smaller problems because you know we see problems that are not necessarily adults who see you know being in a completely different lifestyle and I think you know right now what we're doing is reaching out to brain health centers and getting them to use to get to patients because you know they have the bosses bond to those people and so I think you know those who have established connectivity of today in between youth and the resources that they need to develop communication because before I think I was kind of talking to experts that kind of want to use some aspects of what you said about but I think we'll do that to back to open the communication to later on so that's what I think I agree my expertise is mostly on the energy sector but you know there are a lot of analogies here in the US there's been a chronic and in the years as well there's been a chronic decline in early stage from which you know in some cases particularly for growth patients universities are taking on some of that role and then a direct company is making money from it but you know in energy this is a real grid dire situation as you know you've seen putting costs for renewables but really we're lacking the sort of transformative solutions which are probably there somewhere in if we're able to bring together disparate technologies commercially in the last couple of years and there are still identifiable values of debt as they call them in all development of an idea where you know if it reaches this safe it's going to take off but it can't reach that stage for whatever reason because the public might think it's not there it does look like it's coming back anytime soon so there are a couple of really interesting initiatives here doing this in energy but the model could work you know in health care and so on one of them is the prime coalition they I think they have about 10 million in the philanthropic fund for a year and they identify or find really transformative energy solutions work with the director to develop their ideas and help them come into that gap and there are multiple sort of the generic work that we use to do something in our lab we're meant possible finance labs phoning the signal and all sorts of different things including healthcare, cities, energy and so on and I agree that there should be safe involvement here but we are in a position where we really need to figure out how to do the proper work together in a way that I should say is interesting I think I think you're suggesting that there's sort of a market failure with this project I actually don't think so I think it's actually fundable I mean I really do think it's fundable you're talking about an exploding healthcare crisis where the alternatives for treatment are drugs which have been shown very very low effectiveness so far and long term expensive treatment for the person basically needs a home carry that's dedicated to them so if there's even an incremental that can be proven off of this it's something that's repeatable where a trained user could ease the secondary effects on the home care the primary caregivers usually a close family member and they bear the emotional toll there's a lot of direct financial outcomes that come from this I actually think in some ways this is where when we are in an environment such as this where the government is accepting where there's been willing to take that on do you think actually the private sector could be more fully engaged with the long term opportunities around it I think that's where we sort of get in our own way a little bit with the social side of social entrepreneurship when there is a sustainable in between where there can be some profit and some good outcomes as well great it could be so great but I wanted to say something on what Emma mentioned which I think was an excellent point about how we see aids that sometimes those of older generations might not absorb so my team is comprised of 15 to 25 roles we have been to essentially what we really want to do is ask and hopefully see what can we do as a journalist but you as a youth you as an individual what are you going to do and I think rather than looking at someone to be based on their age with someone so some of our interns are 15 some of our interns are 16 we don't really recognize that of course we're cognizant of ages but rather than being so surprised when someone is 15 or 16 that should be the norm that should be oh okay rather than looking at digits we should be more focused on the ideal itself and investing in the person as opposed to let's say a company invest in the youth as opposed to great thank you and just to finalize the comment that I think asked about at university and just to wrap it up I went to university and I found it to be the ultimate space for actually making an impact because then I had access to venues but even though it's very hard to get venues these days they're very costly so just having university and actually having somewhere to sit without being kicked down wonderful secondly I had a lot of colleagues so peers, volunteers who were working who are the students it was just so easy when we could actually create a social circle and those individual speakers on my best friends because together we were aligned to one thing and it could work together and that resource was almost infinite at one university in Australia around 65,000 students so you can imagine what sort of impact it would make there thirdly professors and experts were very important in being able to inform someone of the decision that it might make it's on the research that it may mean in order to actually make an impact and fourth this project is one of the most fundamental elements of it is that the university provided a framework that basically the associated university actually enabled us to make formal grants to lies in the club society to actually be recognised as part of a legal structure or when students are at university encoding myself become quite together but actually we've got these big huge institutions with huge influence of power within politics being local cities and governments sitting there in many spaces around the world some of the markets we find very difficult to penetrate and I think this would be using that as of course universities and formal education doesn't give you the very basic skill sets and the financial capacity you would need to actually make an impact on the ground I remember the early days of Estates and Youth I had problems with the very basic tasks Excel Google Calendar Mail Emerge I still don't know Mail Emerge especially with the Google and all that other things those very basic skills letter on writing, grants, teaching communicating, effectively spreading problem affecting all of that so I think having a place where you can get the skills as such as a resolution a place where you can also access funding opportunities and finally a place where you can get advice from other people who have done this before this is what the youth solutions report and the youth solutions community enable you guys with your wonderful efforts to actually scale your work and also when I go to the UN I hear speech after speech from ministers afterwards I can go out there and tell your stories and actually talk to some of your ministers and some of your businesses and say look, they can do it from your countries support them, scale them let's make more of these that's what we hope to evaluate so finally a massive thank you to all our panelists and all our participants it's been wonderful being here and hearing your stories and also being able to share the launch of the youth solutions report a massive thank you and I hope you can all connect and share our ideas and network this is where the real value of these events are to be able to network and connect and learn lessons