 We are in a race against time to adapt to a rapidly changing climate. To put it simply, the state of the planet is broken. How can we engage? The entrepreneurial force, not only of large enterprises, but of new startups, of young people. We need all hands on deck to build back after the COVID-19 pandemic. And the greatest and tapped resource that we have is what's in every person's head. The only way to reach the UN SDGs by 2030 is to approach these persistent societal challenges in new ways. Uplink is a perfect platform for this because it brings together in one place social entrepreneurs, businesses, and the public who can combine their efforts. We need business and government. We need civil society. We need all citizens working together. And when we do, we can all be platforms for change. And that's why I'm so excited about Uplink. Young people in particular are very much disadvantaged when it comes to accessing a network. Uplink actually gives them a space to present their ideas and link up with mentors and networks that they might otherwise not have achieved. Exploring how we can unite art, science, and local communities to accelerate marine restoration. My dream is to be a non-profit organisation based in Caroline with the aim to tackle the marine plastic waste. I started SUGI to bring the wisdom of the ancient forest back in the midst of urban life. Portolio Health researchers find cures and treatments that they wouldn't otherwise been able to find. We've developed a technology that can take seawater, convert it into drinking water through the photons of the sun. We all could be tremendous platforms for change. We all could imagine a better, safer, healthier, more equitable, more sustainable world. We can do it together, we can find each other, we can connect, we can create, we can invest, we can grow, and we can achieve with Uplink. Uplink is a unique tool to improve the state of the world. The door is open, the solutions are there. Now is the time to transform humankind's relationship with the natural world and with each other. And we must do so together. Hello and welcome to the Davos Agenda Week. My name is John Dutton. I'm the head of Uplink at the World Economic Forum and thrilled to have you with us for this session entitled, Accelerating Grassroots Innovation. This is a session that is all about the project Uplink that the forum has launched that is looking to highlight some of the great work that we've been on over the last year. Now this all kicked off in Davos a year ago when Davos was launched. We went live with a platform in April. We've been able to source over 900 solutions. There's been 15 innovation challenges that have been run. We've been able to recognize 100 Uplink innovators who are high quality vetted solutions that are supporting the SDGs. And importantly this week, we've been able to pass, in fact, fly past 10,000 users on the platform. We're thrilled to have you here. Now, of course, none of that would be possible without the support of our founding partners for Uplink. First off, of course, Professor Schwab in the World Economic Forum, but also Mark Benioff in Salesforce and Punit Rengen and Deloitte. There have been tremendous collaborations across these three organizations over the last year. Colleagues working tirelessly to launch and implement a platform to support thousands of entrepreneurs who want to make a difference with the SDGs. Now, the session that we're going to run today has really two main objectives. The first is really to inspire the thousands of you that are watching along with us for this session to get involved. Uplink is the forum's first digital open accessible platform that allows anyone anywhere to get involved with the SDGs and it's free. So please do come on, anybody that's joining right now, we'd love to see you sign up for the platform at uplink.weform.org. And of course the second objective is about showcasing some of the impact that this platform has been able to support through the first year. And we're excited for that to have four amazing Uplink innovators with us. They are going to be doing the work for us to tell us about their impact and really share a little bit more about how they're making a difference for the SDGs. Now, before we go to them, a really quick note. I would invite anybody joining us through Zoom, take advantage of the chat function, share any questions that you have or comments. And of course the second half will be a much more interactive portion where we get you into breakouts with each of these innovators. But without any further ado, let me come to our panelists. First, let me introduce Wajija Khalid. Wajija is the co-founder of Cubex Global, a digital marketplace for Seafrate that maximizes empty shipping container space while simultaneously protecting the planet with a more sustainable approach to ocean transport. Wajija is part of the Uplink Ocean cohort, in fact the inaugural cohort on the platform. Kenneth Kwok is the founder of PPP for All, PPE I should say, which commits to producing FDA registered and surgical grade face masks at affordable prices to ensure everyone has access to personal protective equipment. So far one million face masks have been donated to social enterprises and healthcare organizations, most of them belonging to the minority communities. Kenneth is part of our Uplink social justice cohort as part of the COVID challenge. Alban Bresson is the co-founder of Reforestum, which has collaborated with EcoSphere Plus to deliver an end-to-end solution that brings transparency through technology to scale climate action. It's connecting companies and individuals to vital conservation and reforestation projects. Uplink Alban is part of our Uplink Trillion Trees Innovation Cohort. And last but not least, Alexi Levine is the co-founder of Desolinator, a company that helps remote communities build sustainable water resilience in the face of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic by using solar technology to purify water. So with that, let me come to you guys. I'd like to hear from each of you and to share with the audience a bit more about each of your organizations. What is the impact that you're set out to achieve and what is some of your ambition over the next 12 to 18 months? Wajihah, perhaps we can start with you. Thank you, John. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak at this year's Davos agenda. I'm excited about sharing the work that we do at Cubics Global and how Uplink has helped us in our startup journey so far. So the problem that we are trying to solve is that every year 100 million half-empty shipping containers travel from one port to the next, costing $25 billion to the maritime industry. 280 million tons of excessive carbon pollutes our planet due to lack of space utilization of these empty containers. Our startup Cubics Global solves this $25 billion problem and also drastically reduces carbon emissions in ocean freight by up to a 20%. We are an online marketplace where all these half-empty containers are exclusively traded like any other commodity. Anyone can bid for this empty space in real time and once a bid is processed, all documentation takes place on our platform. To this, we are able to create a win-win opportunity for all stakeholders where, number one, shippers can get up to 10 times cheaper rates as compared to the open market. And number two, carriers monetize their empty space and make profit while we earn a commission and help reduce carbon emissions at the same time. Thank you so much for that, Wajiga. Do you want to add a word about any ambitions that you have for the next 12 to 18 months? Yes. So since the start of the pandemic, the global supply chain and the logistics industry has been massively impacted by disruptions and delays. Our demand has skyrocketed three times while our supplies have remained low during the same timeframe. So currently we are facing demand and supply imbalance. So in 2020, we expanded into the USA, Pakistan, Oman and UAE and we are well on track to expand into Saudi Arabia, Singapore and China by the end of this year. But we are also looking for suppliers in the regional corridors while building strong regional teams at the same time. So getting more suppliers on the platform would essentially mean getting more half-empty container traffic onto it, translating into a borderline of achieving our growth and impact targets at the same time. Brilliant. Thank you so much for that, Wajiga. Let's go from the ocean to water. And ocean has saltwater. Alexi, can you talk a little bit about how Desolinator is looking to create a purified version of that for communities around the world? Thank you very much, Sean, and greetings to everybody. So imagine if you could have a reliable, low-cost, scalable supply of high quality water from California to Indonesia to parts of India and Africa and based purely on the power of the sun and abundant resources such as the ocean. So that's what we do at Desolinator. We've developed a technology that can provide sustainable water for not only communities, but also for what I call enlightened corporations that have really embedded sustainability as a part of their strategy, where sustainability is integral and where they have exposure to the water crisis. We can actually create a lot of value by providing water for these people. So as a company, we're seedfunded by one of the top people globally in the industry. We're currently closing our Series A investment round. And despite COVID, we're going live with our first large-scale plant in Dubai, which is what you see behind me, which was super excited about. Our second large-scale plant is in partnership with Carlsberg, and we'll be going live in around May of this year. And I'll share a link below so you can read more about it. In the next 12 to 18 months, our main focus is on the one hand to build out our supply chain. We have huge amounts of demand coming from all over the world, from island nations to corporations in Asia, for example. And really what we're looking to do and what really will move the needle for us is finding particularly corporates, partners, NGOs who are really looking at innovative ways to address the water crisis in a sustainable way and without damage to our oceans. Thank you. Thanks Alexi. Albon, on your side, you guys have been trying to connect companies to projects around the world through transparency and technology. Do you want to talk a little bit about what your solution is all about? With pleasure, John. And again, thank you for having us and great to be here among fellow Blink innovators. So Refarestum, as you've said, it is a marketplace connecting companies and individuals with the best forest projects around the world that are certified to sequester carbon. Now, one of the big problems with carbon offsets generally and voluntary carbon markets over the past decades has been the lack of trust. Trust from consumers, trust from companies, and that really has prevented the markets from scaling. I was hearing about it just on one of the forum panels last night. Now, Refarestum brings technology that helps basically monitor projects at the project level using real-time satellite images. So that brings more transparency on the project side. But we're also making it more accessible for end customers, companies and all stakeholders basically to be joined in a digital community around the forest projects. These are conservation projects as well as reforestation or other nature-based restoration projects. So 2020 was a huge year for us actually. It started with adding EcoSphere Plus as our key partner and we won the trillion tree challenge together. But we also added our corporate partners like Microsoft, L'Oreal and even more recently Miracle and Overs. So this coming year 2021 for us is about validating that we're on the right track, prioritizing with the scarce resources we have and getting more partners on both on board. Both tree planting organizations as well as corporates wanting to get to net zero. Fantastic, Abel. This brings us to you, Kenneth. First to you, Kenneth, you've been involved on a few different elements of this entrepreneurial ecosystem on the one hand through this project PPE for all but also as an impact investor. But maybe starting on the solution side of things, do you want to share a little bit about PPE for all? Sure. Hello everyone. First and foremost, I would like to extend my thank you to the World Economic Forum, to Mr. John Dutton and the entire uplifting team. My name is Kenneth Kwok, my pronouns are he, him and his and I am based in Hong Kong. Well, John, you asked a great question because I always think about how can I, how can we innovate better together and deliver on the SDGs. Here I see an important highlight, which is equity in health and health care. We started with PPE for all. Whereas a manufacturer of surgical masks, family masks has now actually donated 2 million units now with over 70, 75 grassroots organizations around the world with the support of uplink, the forum of young global leaders and the global shapers community. We also shared our know how with other PPE startups in Africa and South America, thanks to uplink. Now we're also moving on to focusing on prenetics, which is on global COVID testing as well. For me, health care is not a cost. It is an investment. And I see three key areas of ambitions in the next 12 to 18 months. First is scaling with public-private community partnerships. Take the example of the UK, where we worked with the UK government to restart the English Premier League season with rapid testing and also to introduce a digital health passport in stadiums. Area two, I would love to do more work using a hybrid for-profit and non-profit framework. Imagine you and I, and just with a single saliva swab, access over 500 health reports. That's whole exome sequencing technology of prenetics and our circle DNA consumer test. Impact is underpinned by a health and well-being. In talking about non-profit, we pivoted from DNA to COVID testing and we launched project screens so that we can look after the elderly, disabled and marginalized. And finally, area three, awareness and community building. There's an old Chinese proverb which states, Xing Wan Li Lu Sheng Du Wan Jun Shu. Sounds fancy, but really it's just action over words. And in Asia, we have strong impact-led communities. Under the patronage of Invest Hong Kong, StartMeUp, you know, Asia's largest startup ecosystem, hosting innovators from 100-plus countries, I would love for offline to work closely with them. We have W Hub, who has the startup and scale-up impact summit with 55,000 members. Lastly, Mainland China, we have Qinghua University with the SDG community. So, at Uplink, we've all found a great impact for an innovative home. What are you all waiting for in the audience? Join us. Thank you, John. Thank you, Kenneth. I think, you know, hopefully this first round gives you a sense of the types of organizations that have come on to Uplink and are really having a real difference. This is just an example. As I said, we've recognized almost 100 Uplink innovators. I thought I'd do a rapid-fire round, actually, to this group again. But we'll also invite you to come with questions, those of you on with us on Zoom. You know, I guess I'd love for you to give an example of the types of needs or kind of priorities. What type of support are you looking for in terms of this next phase of growth that you just outlined? Maybe we start off with you again, Kenneth. Sure. John, I'll be brutally honest here. I am turning 40 this year. So, I've had a lot of time to do personal reflection. You know, I used to think I needed to be an innovator, an investor, an entrepreneur, an educator, an advocate and all that just to make impact. Now with Uplink, anyone can have a voice and truly scale. So, if you ask me one area that would definitely be in government liaison, I'll give you a case study. You know, when invest Hong Kong, you know, during COVID, we actually collected feedback from founders through Start Made of Hong Kong. That got us really targeted initiatives, financial support for companies to retain staff, adoption of fintech and subsidies and all that. So, yes, if I have one ask, I would love Uplink to help us more connecting innovators with government so that we can launch timely and impactful initiatives. Thank you, John. Brilliant. I love how you just kept it to one supporter need that you had. Let's keep going on that theme. Wajih, what about on your side? Yes, John. Thank you. So our immediate needs can be summarized into three points. Number one, getting access to the working capital for meeting our immediate demand levels by investing in technology infrastructure and onboarding more suppliers at the same time. We are open to receiving grants. We see an angel investments for that matter. Number two, getting access to strategic partners for business expansion by opening up more business corridors for our startup. And number third, access to forums and other networking communities for staying up to date with the industry trains and getting access to the right talent pool for building our team from ground up across the corridors that we are operating. Thank you, Wajih. Very clever. You were quick is quick enough to just cover cover three in one. I love that. Albon, what about on your side? Well, on our side, if we had to pick one, I'd say it's to really get to product market fit. And for that, you know, we've seen so many organizations 1500 in this forum alone. Since last year have committed to net zero, but we'd love to help them take it the next step and understand, you know, whatever needs to get that trust, get that transparency, get that engagement from their customers. So getting that discussion started with with those organizations for us is really the key that that link is helping us solve fantastic. A little bit of a call out to any corporate executives are on with us and to join Albon his breakout group later on. I think Alexi on your side. Well, I'd love some of them to join our breakout too. So look, we all know what's happening with our climates. We all know that there's a fundamental shift on the way the technology exists to make that transition. What we're missing is a force, a collective will to actually make that change, not in an incremental way. And so our main focus is to identify key stakeholders, whether from the corporate world, whether from NGOs, you know, who really get that and who really wants to push the boundaries to do transformative work and to hopefully create an unstoppable force. Thanks, Alexi. These give you a sense of a few big ideas that the uplink community is coming up with. I want to take a quick pause and go back to our live stream audience. One of the ways that you can get involved is through a campaign we launched this week called my big idea in collaboration with tiktok. So far there's been 81 million views across the campaign, tons of big ideas are coming through. And our next phase is going to be how can we get more of those big ideas to join us on the uplink platform. So just a bit of a shout out to everybody out there that's already made a contribution to that and please do think about producing your own video if you haven't yet. Let me take a quick pause to see if we have any questions coming in from the audience. There's looks like we have the first one that is come from Sikander, the curator of our Karachi Shapers Hub. Wajih, you must be getting a little bit of support from our Pakistani colleagues across the forums network. And Sikander asks, how are you dealing with your workforce going virtual, especially in the context of social innovators getting started? Maybe you can take a let's just get one or two of you to share kind of this aspect of being an entrepreneur. How has this aspect of going virtual away from the office affected your your operations? Wajih, do you want to take that? Yes. Okay, so I think every every one of us, you know, has gotten impacted by the way, you know, we are working or we have adopted ourselves to, you know, in our work lives in the post pandemic world. And I would say, you know, right now my co founder is on is sitting in Dubai, while I'm sitting in Pakistan, and our back office team is, you know, sitting in another city. So I'd say that with technology, we have been able to, you know, pull all the strings together and work in a very well concerted and you know, in a very coherent way. And although it did bring it fair set of challenges in the beginning, but now we have adopted to it and yes, we are going, going along. And you know, it's it's, it's just the beginning of, you know, how organizations around the world are, you know, getting acquainted to, you know, working alongside technology and you know, getting their workforce up and ready for it. Any other experience maybe one more on this one before we move to one other question. For us, john, it's been relatively straightforward where anyway, you know, as a startup now in this world you're anyway using all the tools that are out there. You know, there's so many tools to be effective. So so having a technology, have it being able to use technology I think is fundamental. I think the most important thing for us is we're a mission driven team. We all have deep roots, we all have deep belief in what we do. And I think if you have that, you can weather transitions like this, you know, people make it work. So it's been a it's been actually I'd say an advantage for us in many ways from an operational point of view. Let me carry on on the digital side as we as we seek other questions from the audience. You know, there's a this aspect of having the public support your efforts and engaging them. And I wonder, Albon, Kenneth, if you have any tips or kind of what has worked for you in terms of engaging the public, how have they been supporting your efforts and how would you ask them to support your efforts. Kenneth. Sure, if my in my humble experience, you know, after all, I am part of the social justice cohort. So I'm going to put it out there. You know, the role of technology in advancing social justice and diversity and inclusion is something that we really believe it's important because upskilling and embracing frontier technology is critical. You know, through top link, I've had the privilege of being introduced to global experts on digital transformation, digital inclusion and cybersecurity for gender parity, LGBTI equality, disabilities inclusion, racial justice and more, because no one absolutely no one should be left behind as we reset and rebuild our resilience and trust. So, yes, education for all is definitely something we do for all our team members and hopefully the entire ecosystem of startups and innovators. On to you, Albon. Thanks a lot, Kenneth. On our side, that's how reference to start it actually was as a digital community supporting local reforestation projects in Spain. Diego, our founders started started the company with this mission in mind and since then we've expanded and really found corporations to be the lens through which we want to touch so many more people and bring them all onto this digital community where they can see their platform and our aim is to, you know, reach a billion customers in terms of carbon pricing at the product level by 2025 with our partners ecosphere. So it's pretty ambitious, but we think we can get there. Fantastic. We have maybe one more minute for questions. Anything coming through the audience. Let's see here, maybe I'll go to Alexia on the same question about engaging consumers. Either of you guys like to comment on the importance of consumers or the public for your for your efforts. Sure, I can. I mean, we're we're developing systems that are quite large scale. So our customers are governments, businesses, charitable organizations. However, what we've seen is that there's a huge amount of support out there. You know, we've been amazed that through the uplink program, you know, video that was made got over 400,000 views in a day and it's incredibly heartening. And for me, it says that there's the beginnings of a movement here. And what hopefully we can do in a small way is to provide a bit of vision to enable that movement and to gain strength. So I think, you know, whether it's your 15 years old and in your bedroom and you want to get involved, you know, reposting, creating awareness, ensuring that the water crisis is actually on people's radar and something people care about because by 2030 on current trajectory, half the world won't have reliable access to clean water by 2030. So we need everybody involved in this. Thank you. I'm going to I'm going to stop there. We have one question that I feel like is that's coming from the audience from Andre Hoffman. In fact, one of the forums board of trustee members fantastic to have you on with us. The, you know, from your question, what makes uplink unique? There's been others that have tried this this role of connecting the VC world with with entrepreneurs and the ecosystem. And, you know, maybe I'll take that as an opportunity to talk a little bit about our evolution and invite our studio to just quickly bring the platform up on the screen for us. This is a platform that we're really excited about. It's it is, as I said, the first digital platform that the forum has put together that allows anyone anywhere to get involved. We also know that it's it's got a long way to go and it we're really proud of the progress. Thanks to the support from Salesforce and Deloitte that we've made over the last 12 months. But there's a number of things that we need to improve upon. One is, you know, Kenneth, you touched on some aspects of this. We need to be more inclusive, both in terms of language barriers that are currently there for some entrepreneurs and change makers, but also by seeking out underrepresented geographies, sectors and populations to tap into. And then to your point, Andre, the we've started out the platform by really trying to focus on how to make it a great platform for entrepreneurs. But the next phase is about how can we bring on experts bring on investors, corporate executives, funders and organizations that would actually like to launch innovation challenges. You'll hear later on in the second half about some of the and in fact in the closing film about some of the next innovation challenges and and already funders and philanthropists and companies have been excited to leverage uplink for their challenges. And I think that's that's really at the heart of it. How can you pin together the the solutions that are out there with some of the big challenges and needs that companies, organizations, the UN and other philanthropic organizations are really looking to solve. But I just conclude this piece, I would say, you know, this is a free platform for everybody that's dialing in and joining us on the live stream. Help us populate the platform, bring it to life because there are amazing entrepreneurs like these four that are helping to achieve the SDGs. With that, maybe I invite our team to launch the last video. Anybody on zoom with us, please do stick around. After this video, we will come back and have some additional conversations where you can get to know our innovators in a little bit more of a private manner. Thank you so much to everybody and join us for uplink's impact. Uplink has not only achieved impressive success, but it is now recognized as a globally inclusive platform for addressing the SDGs. We must use this moment to truly catalyze change. We must identify what is working, the new ways and innovations that are delivering results for students and what we can learn from and scale. We can do it together as entrepreneurs, as visionaries, people who are committed to helping each other, supporting each other. We're going to become an ecopreneurs. We're all focusing on ecopreneurship. How can we not? The night our video got published. In the first 24 hours, we generated almost 2,000 leads. Our funds were running off the hook. It also brought an enormous amount of people downloading the app and actually requesting it for us. The Prime Minister of Norway actually gave us a video message congratulating us. Being part of a platform like Uplink and benefiting from the exposure that this platform has was a real game changer. It's the access that it gets us to important stakeholders that we would not have had an access to before. Urge you to get engaged and to use this tool for the benefit of all of us for the benefit of humankind.