 Okay, good morning, afternoon and evening to you all. Good morning, afternoon and evening to you all. My name is Kayla Coyard and I am the symposium coordinator or what's going on? I think everybody should mute everybody else. Maybe that's it, let's hope. I think that's what happened. Okay, sorry everybody. Good morning, afternoon and evening to you all. My name is Kayla Coyard. I am the symposium coordinator from the SDSN and I'm very pleased to welcome you all to day one of the eighth annual Vatican Youth Symposium hosted by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network Youth Initiative and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Although we are hoping to meet in person this year, the pandemic has made the decision for us and we're convening for our second virtual edition today and tomorrow. Before we get started, just a few housekeeping items to our participants, please pose your questions for our speakers in the Q&A box and be sure to state your full name in which country you are from. We encourage you to share your impressions on social media using the hashtag VYS 2021 and to share your voices in our networking session immediately following the final session of the day both today and tomorrow. This is my fourth Vatican Youth Symposium and it would not be possible without Ms. Gabriella Marino and Monsignor Marcelo Sanchez-Sarando of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and SDSN president, Professor Jeffrey Sacks who are all joining us today in this opening session. Also providing remarks will be the honorable Mia Motley, Prime Minister of Barbados and Mr. Brighton-Koma, Director of SDSN Youth. Now, without further ado, I'd like to welcome Professor Jeffrey Sacks to officially start us off with the opening session as a world-renowned economics professor, best-selling author, innovative educator and global leader in sustainable development. Jess also serves as a strong proponent for youth empowerment and advocating for the vital and active role young people must take in order to achieve the SDGs. Jeff, the floor is yours. Hey, La, thank you very much and what a pleasure and honor it is to be with everybody today, though of course we so much wanna be together at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Casino Pioquatro in Vatican City. So we're looking forward to being together in person, face to face as soon as we can safely do so. But this is a wonderful occasion and important, wonderful part of our year, every year. And I am so profoundly grateful to one senior Marcelo Sanchez-Sarondo, the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences for giving us the inspiration and for each year guiding us, inspiring us and co-hosting this event together with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. I think it's very notable that when Pope Francis called for a new economic vision as he has been doing throughout his pontificate and so powerfully and so importantly, and he called for an economy of Francesco for Francis of Assisi, he directed the effort to young people. He didn't say, let's get a bunch of old people together to figure out the new economy. He said, let's have young people from around the world come together to help build a new economy of social justice and environmental sustainability. And the economy of Francesco is a wonderful guide for us in the Vatican Youth Assembly, the Vatican Youth Symposium on the leadership of all of you, of young leaders to say in our century, in our time, we are committed to social justice and we are committed to finding a way forward for the entire world, for the common good. That's the purpose of the Vatican Youth Symposium. And I am excited to see the results of yesterday's discussions, which I understand were very, very exciting and the brainstorming that you will be having in this symposium. We at the Sustainable Development Solutions Network are so eager to amplify your voices, your guidance, your leadership, your determination. That's what we at SDSN are here for. And to get us started, we're going to hear from one of the people in the world that most inspires me. And in fact, two in a row with the Monsignor will speak in just a moment. But first I wanna introduce a real hero of mine the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Motley. She's phenomenal and you'll hear why in just a moment personally, if you don't know her yet but she's a leader of a beautiful country and a beloved leader, I can tell you because when I went to Barbados to have an event with her discussion about these issues everywhere, people were explaining and singing her praises and I know why and she has been guiding Barbados through this very challenging period. And it's not just COVID, it's also volcanoes. It's also all of the other upheavals that come but what a beautiful country you lead Prime Minister and your voice is so important for us on global justice and on the practicalities of global politics. You have had many portfolios in the government before becoming the national leader, the Prime Minister. You've also been Minister of Education, Youth Affairs and Culture, which is a great set of issues exactly for us today and very importantly, everybody should know Prime Minister Mia Motley is also the chair of the Development Committee of the World Bank and IMF, which means that her voice is crucial for helping to set the worldwide development agenda and in that capacity she's been calling for social justice for a new global financial order for debt relief for countries that need it. So it's a thrill to have you with us to help us get started and over to you Prime Minister. Thank you very much, Jeffrey, for your most kind remarks and it's so wonderful seeing you again. I just wish that we could have you here and everyone else who's on this call could be in Barbados at this point in time. Our winter season has officially started, tourism season has officially started. So I can pretend that you're here and wish you all a wonderful welcome. Ms. Collier, the moderator, your Excellency, Monsignor Marcelo Sanchez Sarondo, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences, Mr. Brighton Keoma, Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Good morning to all of you. And I want to say that it's my pleasure really today to join you. Anything that Jeffrey asked me to do, I try to do because he talks about me, but he is our hero and he has been that conscience for those of us who work in the world of politics and economics and every day to have his moral compass continue to remind us why global moral strategic leadership is so critical today when the world is facing perhaps its most challenging times in a century. I want to thank the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network for inviting me to engage with young people, global change agents, as you must be at this eight annual vacation news symposium. This is the second year that this gathering of global thought leaders and young champions of sustainable development is meeting virtually, I'm told. But this is one of, we know, the many disruptions to our lives coming out of this COVID-19 pandemic. But as I said, here we are nonetheless, the young and in my case, in spite of my gray hair, I hope the forever young at heart. We're meeting across continents, across languages, across time zones for one shared purpose and way so that we may secure a better and a sustainable future for all. I want to remind some of you here about a movie that you may well be too young to remember. It's called Dead Poets Society and I can see Jeffrey and others laughing because I'd really love you to watch it if you haven't as young people. In that movie, the late American actor, Robin Williams, played a brilliant but unconventional teacher who said to his students and I quote, no matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world, unquote. In the most famous scene, the teacher huddles his students together and tells them and I quote, we don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race and the human race is filled with passion, medicine, law, business, engineering. These are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life but poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. He then quotes from the iconic American poet, Walt Whitman, oh me, oh life, of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish, what good amid these, oh me, oh life? And then Williams smoothly concludes, answer, that you are here and that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. He then repeats that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. And staring directly into their face, he asks the simple question, what will your verse be? Apple recently gave this monologue, new life using it for a breathtaking ad for the iPad, but trust me, watch the movie. Back to the matter at hand, what will your verse be? And this is a question I confess I've often grappled with and it is the question that I want to pose to each and every one of you today. What will your verse be? In my own context, at this moment in time, my verse is that I'm the leader of a small island state as you've heard and it's people are fighting for space to survive. In fact, more than just survive, we're fighting for a space to live our lives in the middle of a global pandemic. We, like the rest of the world, are not doing great but all things considered, we're doing okay. But from there, we have other challenges of which the existential climate crisis is also one of the key ones that we have to keep in focus as we fight this pandemic. Our context here in the Caribbean, where I'm from, is that we're fighting to live on these multiple fronts. And as I said, the global warming of the climate crisis has meant an unprecedented increase in the frequency and ferocity of our hurricanes and our other major events, costing lives and livelihoods and devastating economies. We used to have a hurricane season from June to October. Now in May, we're hearing about named storms coming our way in circumstances where we go right down even to November. To go even deeper in my context, we are a Caribbean that has exited colonial rule, empty-handed, I might add, without the type of development compact that many European and Middle Eastern countries were given. Small populations fragmented across small islands, comprising largely of people whose ancestors were kidnapped and carried across the Atlantic, systematically stripped of their identity, families decimated and destroyed, miseducated for centuries, and forced to live and work in constant fear of punishment and of death. Despite my friends being the victims of the most heinous sins in the history of humanity, we live, we thrive, and we excel. This is the context within which the Caribbean exists. We are a region and a people that provides the world with beauty and music and food and ideas and laughter and innovation and tolerance and happiness and scientific research, not because of our history, but my friends, in spite of our history, we exist as a living testament that humanity's future can always be much brighter than its past. So as you prepare to discuss the challenges and the unforeseen opportunities of COVID-19 on advancing the global sustainable development over the next two days, and we know there are serious challenges, I want you to do so with optimism and with conviction. I gave you the context of my region to show you that no matter the crisis, whether the climate crisis, whether an economic crisis or that of public health, or the compounded impacts of COVID-19, the disruption that occurs in a crisis provides the opportunity for transformative action to be taken. Change will occur. It is a certainty. It is an inevitable part of the cycle of existence. What is not certain is whether the change that occurs will be for the better, because better means actual hard work. Better means the work that demands from us as individuals, from communities, from institutions that we all collaborate and operate with that genuine spirit of fairness, of justice, of equality, of dignity and respect. And I say so conscious that that is the platform for the global moral strategic leadership that must come not only at the high levels of government, but at each and every stage of life and in each and every sector. Moral leadership, because what we must do must be rooted in ethical behavior. Strategic, because the multiple problems that we face, ranging from the climate crisis to the pandemic to the realities that even after this, we are fighting against the next pandemic, one that may arise like this one, or the one that we know is already entrained like the antimicrobial resistance one, where we expect to reach that if we don't solve it, we can reverse a century of medical progress because of the resistance of our bodies to antibiotics and our inability to fight the super viruses that are currently coming more and more in our societies and especially in our hospitals. Or even the prospect that the soil that we need to grow our food may well not have the nutrients that it needs in 60 years from now. These are the challenges and the crisis that we are facing. And I say so against the backdrop of a country that has experienced this year, its first hurricane in 66 years, its first volcanic ash fall in 119 years, and Barbados does not have a volcano, but the ash came 90 miles over the oceans from St. Vincent when La Sefre erupted in April. And of course, the worst pandemic in 102 years with the variants creating their own lives within the context of that pandemic in a way that is as destabilizing as if they were separate pandemics. The glaring reality coming out of all of this is that my friends, they can be no better. And by extension, no peace where inequity and inequality exists, where people are not seen, felt or heard. Inequity is and has always been the greatest enemy of true progress. And until our leaders send to their actions on equity, then we will be victims of change rather than leaders of transformation and improvement. It is for this reason that we set about articulating a new charter of Barbados as we became a new parliamentary republic less than two weeks ago. A symbolic representation of the very best of who we are and all of who we can aspire to be. An enduring gift to be passed down from generation to generation. And we felt that it was important to root what we are doing in those ethical considerations. In it, we have enshrined the commitment that generation is indebted to the ones which preceded it and is morally obligated to the ones that follow. We do so because we felt that it was important that we reinforce the notion that we are really just running a leg in a relay and that our role is to hold the battle, preserve it, build upon it, build upon the time and pass it on with pride to the next generation. This is why today I can say to you with absolute resolve that the world needs you, young, smart, compassionate, brave people, ready to rise to contribute, to collaborate and to lead. We see the effects of the global gap in strong moral leadership and the inequitable access to vaccines by developing states, hence the variants that I speak about. We see it in the fact that most of the smallest contributors to the global carbon emissions, like my own country, other small island developing states are the worst impacted by the effects of the climate crisis and are fighting a seeming indifference to the fact that any global temperature increased beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius is effectively a death sentence, as I said at Glasgow, for our frontline societies. And while we thank and are glad that that 1.5 remains vaguely and weakly alive, we are conscious that what we were talking about is ambition as opposed to action. We also see it in the unjust global financial order which functions to maintain the systems of enrichment and impoverishment that eerily resemble the world a century ago. How else can you explain Ghana and Greece? Similar ratings by international credit agencies, but a completely different cost of capital when they go to the international capital markets. My friends, we were reminded by his holiness, Pope Francis, who I admire greatly, during his recent speech at the fourth world meeting of the popular movements, that it is in the docile acceptance that, and I quote, there can be no other way that we will find our destruction. The docile acceptance that there can be no other way that we will find our destruction. His holiness cites the power of the collectors to marathon and restoring dignity to the marginalized and the abused, while mobilizing others to the cause whether or not they themselves are directly impacted by the injustice. Reemphasizing the point that it is in greed, selfishness, and isolationism, that the seeds of our destruction are sown. So if greed, selfishness, and isolationism are what rips our societies apart, then it stands to reason that compassion, love, and unity are what can repair us. I know this is a heavy responsibility. I get it, I understand, trust me. I know some of you may even think it's easy for her to say so. She's a prime minister, I'm not. My contribution will be too small. But let me remind you that I am from that island of 166 square miles, less than 300,000 people. Yet we have produced cigar field sobers, the greatest cricketer of all time. For those of you who love cricket, you know that implicitly. And we've also produced Robin Rihanna Fenty, for those of you who love music and business and fashion. My friend's size has never determined the significance of our contribution to the world. As Mahatma Gandhi says, the change starts with each and every one of us. Unlike much of the rest of the world, we in this small place have figured out that despite our history of forced arrivals and departures, forced migration, we have to find a way for us to get along. We don't have a choice. In many ways, our ability to exist so peacefully on such a small, small space is a marvel. And that is why for 30 years I've said we have a story to tell to the rest of the world. Despite what has come before, we are in the course of the majority of the last 80 years, a region of peace. Despite what is to come, we are a range, a region of diverse faiths. And that is why my government is intent on working with the faiths and religions of the world to put on what is, in fact, the oldest theological seminary in the Americas, I believe, and certainly in the Caribbean, sorry, Covington College, a spiritual university that brings together representations from all of the religions and faiths of the world, not just the Abrahamic faiths, but all. Because we need to learn how to live together on a small space in ways that advance the causes of humanity and that reinforce the values that will fight the inequity and help us to be resilient across these different crises to which I've spoken. Like any family in our country, we have our disagreements. But for the most part, we understand in this region that we share a space and we must find a way to get along. We demonstrate to the world the beauty of small as an advantage. We demonstrate to the world the critical importance of learning to live with one another. The advances of technology and the increasingly digital oriented world we live in has made everything small and everything near. Indeed, we fight the ravages of narrow cast in as opposed to broad cast in because narrow cast in reinforces the very concepts that we've already accepted as our own in many instances and not expose in persons to other views that are critical if we are to learn to live together and to work together in small spaces. You have the greatest awareness and understanding of the world in the history of mankind. For many of you, it has given a great appreciation for your duty and obligation to make the world better. And I ask you to embrace it. Embrace it and do good and build and share and dream and love and act. Many of you may be aware of the Solution Noble Literature, Laureate Derek Walcott, who summed it up magnificently when he wrote a verse that I quote only too often. And I repeat it here. Brick of ours and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. Within each of you, each and every one of you young people listening to me right now resides all of the capacity that is needed to safeguard humanity's future. There is no other force in this world that can compare to the innate ability of young people to deconstruct injustices and to rebuild the bonds that hold us together through the most beautiful of creative expressions. As a young student in London, many of us became involved in the anti-apartheid movement and saw as the young people of South Africa rose up to turn back the clock of decades of oppression and decades of racial prejudice and brutality. You young people, the world's young people have the ability, both the ability and the courage to create hope in the most hopeless of circumstances. You have the conviction of collaboration and the gift to take the broken fragments left by the status quo and to reconstruct the collective vision of an improved and a sustainable future for all, all of us. Always learning from the lessons of the past but never seeking to replicate them. Building forward, not back. This is the future you deserve. This is the future you must build. And this, my friends, I believe will be the future that you will build. I promise you that I will continue to do my part and that my country will continue to do its part in the fight to safeguard a sustainable future. And we are confident that you too will put your best foot forward. I encourage you to dare to dream. I've always felt that daring to dream as big as you can is important. But whenever you dare to dream as big as you can, always be determined to do. For as we have learned and as we have been taught, faith without works appoints to nothing. I wish you all the very best as you reflect and learn in this symposium. Thank you very much. Bravo, bravo. Thank you so much for the wisdom and the inspiration and the instruction to all of us to contribute a verse and to the young people to contribute a verse. And thank you, Prime Minister, for the new charter of Barbados, which is absolutely remarkable. And we will share that charter with everybody. I'd like everybody to read it. The pillars of the charter are based on human dignity for all the duty to care for each other, which is absolutely remarkable. The duty to participate in the economic, political, and social life of the country. The right to live in a healthy and balanced environment and Barbados' participation in the global community. It's a wonderful document, so inspiring. And we want to make that very widely known as your remarks today will be very widely known as well. It's a great pleasure to now turn the microphone to our host, Monsignor Marcelo Sanchez-Surondo, the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and a profound inspiration for all of us and a great guide in moral wisdom for the world and a tremendous leader in sustainable development whose two academies, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences played and play absolutely historic roles in bringing the sustainable development goals to fruition, bringing the Paris climate agreement to fruition and keeping the global energy and supporting Pope Francis to help us to achieve what we have set out to achieve. So Marcelo, thank you as always for everything and thank you today for hosting this year's Vatican Youth Symposium and it's a joy to turn the microphone to you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jeff. I am very, very happy to be invited to participate in this very important meeting. I thank also the Prime Minister of Barbados that was a very important speech. And I want to say that maybe she knows that of the point of view ecclesiastic, Barbados belong to Latin America. So you belong then to the Pope Francis. In the idea, our idea about the distribution in the talk. So all the communications to make the Latin America conference safe and also Barbados. So it's very important to know that you are already independent and you have your freedom to realize your project for your country and for all the countries of Latin America. So we are in the same ship in the history. So congratulations, Minister, also for your ideas. I am very, very happy to help you. But I say, look, the Pope continue to say, we need to come back of this crisis, but to come back, we need not to repeat the mistakes of the past, but we need to start from different points. I think the more important points are the life, truth, good, social justice, the attitude, nice things. We say, sorry for my deformation philosophical, but we say these are the transcendentals of the being because the being, the life, want to be truth, special for the human life, want to be good, want to be just, want to be beautiful, want to be pulcritudinous, say, in Latin, and Pope Francis say, today we need to follow the way of the pulcritudinous. And these ideas that are the ideas of, because to knowledge these things, we become human beings in the measure that we realize these ideas, say the classic, are concrete in the Beatitudes of the Gospel that are for all people. So another project of the Pope Francis. But we have the great lucky that not only this project is in the mind of the Pope Francis, but also in some post, but is also in the United Nations because the goals are just these, a concretion of these things. So we have the great lucky that Pope Francis, the Academy of course, to help Pope Francis and the United Nations, Jeffrey Sacks, the General Secretary of the United Nations, agree what is the way to become human, human, complete human, what is the way to become more truth, more good, more justice, more solidarity, more beautiful, the things that we need to do. So the young people is our, we need to empower the young people to believe in this. And I want to finish with the finish of the very interesting text of the Pope that is more or less the basic of this meeting. That was the last approach that the Pope do with the popular movements or anti-popular. And the Pope say, look, we need to be awareness that God is with us. God not want to lose, he packed with the humanity. So, but for this, we need to replay to God and to be and to pray to God. Because some tendency, I say the Pope just when he come back to Greece, some tendency today is to say, but religion is something of medieval things and they don't want to accept it more, they do God. I am very happy that the minister put also this problem and the young people need to not be colonized, but this idea that God and our relation with God and the presence of God and the collaboration of the Providence with us is a medieval idea that today not have any sense. So we want to finish to say to the young people to remember this dimension that is really the more important dimension because really we can love the other as we say if we love also God. In the contrary, we say, but in reality, we don't love the other. So please, I want to put in account this important idea that is not so present today in our meeting. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, minister. Thank you, Carla. Thank you, the new president, Brighton. Thank you, Gabriela, because it really was very important in the organization of this meeting. Thank you very much. Thank you for your wisdom and your words and your reminder to us of the transcendental goods that we are seeking. And now it's a great pleasure to turn it over to Brighton Kaoma, our dear colleague and leader of SDSN Youth who will help to guide all of the symposium going forward. So thank you very much, Brighton. Great to see you and over to you. Thank you so much, Professor Sacks and warm welcome to everybody joining us from near and far. And may I also observe the presence of Prime Minister Maya Motley. Very excited to hear your energetic and inspiring words of wisdom. I believe so many young people like myself joining us have been inspired to dream big and think about themselves as instruments of change. I'd like to also recognize the presence of the Pontific Academy of Sciences and Social Sciences Chancellor as well as the presence of all the distinguished leaders that have helped put the Vatican Youth Symposium together. I'd like to first of all begin by highlighting that SDSN Youth and its membership has over the last few months looked at ways and mechanisms of increasing our presence, our footprint, but most importantly, building a community of leaders that can help accelerate solutions for the sustainable development goals. And the Vatican Youth Symposium this year is particularly instrumental in that when we reflect on when the sustainable development goals were established and the next coming 2030 when we need to reflect back, we're at a greater extent colleagues at halftime and while we're at halftime and we reflect back what sort of progress have we achieved? What sort of enemies like the COVID-19 pandemic is leading to regress in the development of society? But at the same time, I want to highlight the fact that the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network Youth is mandated to work with young people irrespective of what sort of work they are doing, provided they are contributing to the betterment of society. We believe in collaboration. That's why having all of you today is symbolic of our core value of working together. We believe that time for being a lone ranger is long gone. The best results are achieved through collaboration. That's why SDSN Youth keeps expanding through our SDG student hubs. We are working in over 100 hubs around the world. We just graduated our local pathways fellows a few days ago and we're enrolling a new court of local pathway fellows, young people that would design and shape the future of cities. We launched our innovation readiness program, inviting young people to become part of our process of co-creating innovative solutions for sustainable development. And very soon we'll be launching one of our legacy innovation seed grants that is going to allow young people to come together and pitch their ideas and solutions for a sustainable future. We believe that poverty, inequalities are all real. As a young Zambian that grew up in an environment where so many of our young people were raised and grew up in environments that were challenging. With over 2 million people living with HIV, development is nothing that's rhetoric. Our work is nothing that's rhetoric. Our work centers on changing the lives of others. And we see ourselves as strong instruments, strong agents of change. That's why joining SDSN youth and being given the mantle and privilege to be able to work with a global network of inspiring and determining young people. It's a huge honan privilege because everybody who's part of our network is creating better and sustainable change in their communities. As you joined us today and tomorrow, I wish to remind you that this space is a space for everybody. Everybody is welcome. And we believe that together by creating solutions for sustainable development will be guaranteed of a better society. A society that is inclusive, a society that provides education to every child irrespective of where they are born. A society that provides healthcare for everybody and the society that believes in giving equal opportunities for all. That's why SDSN youth exists to create opportunities for all and to help provide pathways and tools for sustainable development solutions. I'm very grateful and I wish you nothing but the very best. Continue sharing online, continue tweeting, continue collaborating and continue inviting others to join us in the next couple of days. And we look forward to having you a part of the SDSN youth network. We have ambitious goals and we are not apologetic about our goals. We want to expand and if possible, be in every part of the world where we can spread the message of sustainability, the message of equal education, the message of quality education and the message of sustainable development solutions. And we hope you can collaborate with us and work with us because our goals and ambitions are quite high. And we would want to work with people like all of you that believe in creating a better society for all. I thank you and I look forward to interacting with you in the next day as we continue with our mask and use symposium. Thank you. Thank you so much, Brighton. Thank you so much. Your Excellency, Mia Motley, Monsignor, Jeff and we are going to begin our next session, a session for education for sustainable development. And I'm going to hand it over to Ms. Amanda Abram who is the manager of the Global Schools Program of the SDSN, Amanda. Thank you so much, Kayla. I'm very happy to be moderating this next session. Welcome to our session on education for sustainable development. We are thrilled to have you with us as we discuss one of the most important topics when it comes to achieving the 2030 agenda and the SDGs. And to achieve sustainable development every individual must acquire the sustainable development knowledge, global citizenship values and 21st century skills that are critical to tackling our shared challenges. And across SDSN Youth and SDSN there are many education programs, initiatives and volunteers working towards bringing the SDGs into schools, universities and more. The SDG students program is working towards creating leaders at the university level and Global Schools works with educators and teachers to train them on ESD concepts. We will hear about both of those programs today. Additionally, Global Schools, SDG Academy and their partners at the Ban Ki Moon Center, UNESCO and CSD launched Mission 4.7, a global initiative to put education for sustainable development into practice. Mission 4.7 draws upon UNESCO's leadership and brings together leaders from government, academia, civil society and business to accelerate the implementation of transformative education. And in this capacity, we are honored to introduce Minister Nikki Karemus, the Greek Minister of Education and Religious Affairs who serves on the high level advisory group of Mission 4.7. And the honorable Nikki Karemus has been serving as the Minister of Education and Religious Affairs since 2019. She is a lawyer practicing mainly in the field of international arbitration with significant experience in Greece and internationally. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Paris II. And she is a founding member and first president of the Nonprofit Foundation, DESMOS which locates surplus from companies and individuals to cover the needs of Greece's most vulnerable citizens and social welfare organizations. So I would love to hand it over to the honorable minister to give us her thoughts on education for sustainable development and transformative education. Good afternoon to all. Thank you so much for your kind words and thank you very, very much for the honorable invitation to be with you here today. Thank you to UNSDSN and to Professor Sacks personally, to the organizers, to the Academy as a whole. I'm really delighted to be here among such distinguished panelists. And to be here to talk about an issue that's really tough. How do you prepare our youth for the future? Future is gonna be changing at a very, very fast pace. How do you equip the youth with knowledge and skills that are gonna be necessary to them in order to be able to adapt to a very fast changing world? I would like to focus on four challenges and four solutions to those challenges for sustainable development and education. So the first challenge I would identify is the need to focus on soft and digital skills. I think now more than ever, there is a need to move from an education system that focuses exclusively on teaching students to an education system that teaches students how to learn. And I think that's gonna be increasingly important given that our youth and our children are going to enter, say the workforce in 2035, let's say for instance, at a time when they're gonna be called upon to adapt to very fast changes. And most likely to several professions too, because I think we have moved to a world where it's no longer the case that one practice is just one profession, but rather it has become the norm to change more than one profession. So I think it's becoming increasingly important to acquire soft and digital skills and to teach our children how to learn. So how do we do that? How do we focus on skills? First of all, which skills am I referring to? Soft skills such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, digital skills, and language skills in particular. So what we've done in Greece, we have moved in two directions regarding skills. The first is we have revamped all school curricula and we have integrated what the UN really stands for in terms of sustainable development across all disciplines. So I'm just gonna give you an example. For instance, chemistry, we're focusing a lot on green chemistry and creation of new bio-friendly materials. In history, we're taking approaches more global than before. In physical education, we're focusing not only on athletics but also on healthy lifestyles. So we have revamped old school curricula from the age of four to the age of 18 to include the focus on skills, both soft skills and digital skills. And we have also created a new module, what we call the Skills Lab. So imagine the Skills Labs are integrated in the mandatory school program. So just like kids are taught, for instance, history and physics and math, they're also taught topics like climate change, like sex education, like entrepreneurship. So all of these modules are integrated in the mandatory school program and are organized around four axes. The first has to do with wellbeing. The second has to do with the environment and the protection of the environment and climate change. The third has to do with inclusion and diversity, respect for others, respect for diversity. And the fourth one has to do with technology, science, robotics, STEM, STEAM, et cetera. So this started last year as a one-year pilot program. We have scaled up. Right now it's enforced in every school of Greece from the age of four to the age of 15. So a real focus on skills. So the first challenge, which I think is really important in terms of sustainable development for education is the focus on soft and digital skills. The second challenge I would highlight is the need to bring closer education to the actual needs of the labor market. And I say this also in line with my introduction about the changing world that our children are gonna enter into. And the need to be in a position to adapt in this changing labor environment. So that's why, for instance, we have invested heavily in vocational education and training. And the way we as a government and as a ministry of education decide, for instance, what specialties are gonna be offered in vocation education schools, we first go and see what the actual needs of the labor market are. So for instance, we are in a process of decarbonizing in Greece. So one of the professions we're really focusing on is renewable energies and technicians for renewable energies. So we first go and detect the actual needs of the labor market and then we take that analysis into account when forming curricula and specialties. The third challenge I would identify is the need to guarantee access to all. We cannot move ahead unless we all move together. And that's one of the reasons, for instance, why we have extended school. So we have included an additional year in preschool. Preschool nine Greece starts at the age of four. It used to start at the age of five. Also, for instance, following up on the pandemic and the need for the digital transformation of education, we provided vouchers to approximately 560,000 students from the age of four to the age of 24 in order for them to purchase digital devices and be in a position to follow very closely this digital transformation and participate in this digital transformation of education because nobody should be left behind. Same goes for our national action plan for people with disabilities and the need to focus a lot on, for instance, digital devices for students with disabilities, digital content accessible to all students, physical access, of course, in all schools. So this has to do with the third challenge, inclusion and guaranteeing access to all. And the fourth challenge and last is I think the need to focus on extraversion. I truly believe that our education systems have to reflect the reality of an increasingly interconnected world. And here I'm focusing even more on universities. Hence, I think it's of crucial importance to do a lot of work on mutual recognition of degrees, to promote the internationalization of programs at all levels, but mostly at the university level to support agreements for foreign language programs, for exchanges of students, researchers, professors. I think that really skies the limit in terms of partnerships that can be formed in order to really reflect and endorse the reality of this interconnected world. We have a lot to offer to our youth and I think that this is a most challenging time to really transform education in line with our goals for sustainable development. Thank you very much. Thank you, minister. Thank you for your leadership, which is so galvanizing, so clear and absolutely crucial for Greece without question, but your words resonate, I think globally, without missing a beat. And it's exactly what we are looking for and thanking you for guidance for the work that we are doing and that you and I are doing together with UNESCO, with the Vatican, with the Ban Ki Moon Center, with others in the mission 4.7, which is to put into reality this commitment to teach for the future, teach for the future of sustainable development, of cultural appreciation, of the transcendent good and of the realism of the future of the economy, which is going to require, as you say, not only knowledge in the traditional sense, but the how to learn. Also, the universal access to digital services is crucial and you've shown how this can be done. And so we wanna learn from your experience in that regard as well. We're going to hear now from our on-the-ground efforts led by young people in the SDSNU and Amanda, our moderator has been one of the great leaders in this effort, the Global Schools Program, which is working with schools all over the world to do exactly what you're helping us to do, Madam Minister, which is to be really well targeted on how to achieve education for sustainable development. So thank you. Let me take the opportunity also to wish you and everybody else a happy new year as I pass and happy Merry Christmas and the holiday season for all as I pass the microphone over to Amanda to talk about the Global Schools Program. And thank you, Minister, for being with us. Thank you so much, Minister. Thank you so much, Professor Sacks. As he said, I will now share a little bit about the grassroots work that we're doing at the Global Schools Program before introducing the rest of the speakers for this session. Global Schools mission is to create a world where every primary and secondary school student is equipped with the knowledge and skills to respond to the challenges of this century. And this year we have made tremendous progress in growing our network and schools that have signed the pledge to integrate sustainable development into their curriculum, operations and communities. Our network now encompasses 1270 schools, 99,000 educators and 1.1 million students in 89 countries. And this year the main focus was rebranding our advocates program for educators and teachers and broadening our available translations into eight more languages. And we were delighted to accept over 500 teachers and educators into the Global Schools community this year who took our training course and began acting as action planners and connectors within their school to really bring long-term strategies for transformative education into those communities. Our first cohort of the year reached 27,000 students and 6,800 teachers through lessons and activities on sustainable development. They also trained 3,500 additional teachers on education for sustainable development with presentations and workshops at the grassroots level. And what we really see through transformative education at Global Schools is they are not only working with their students on lessons and activities but they also have integrated ESD in their school curriculum. Approximately 60% of our alumni have integrated ESD into the curriculum. 40% have made sustainability a strategic goal of the school to really ensure that this is taken forward for years to come. Others have integrated ESD into staff development, creative planning committees, improved water and waste management and so much more. And through Global Schools, what we really have seen at the grassroots level is the tremendous power of education for sustainable development to change attitudes and values. And we have been many stories of change that have been brought up from the network, from our teachers and from our schools. For example, a school in Tanzania informed us that they have actually seen school attendance increase across the entire school because students are more engaged and excited to participate in active learning projects. Another school in Turkey noted an increase in student achievement and learning outcomes after using Global Schools resources and integrating transformative education competencies. And finally a school in Brazil will now have a new course on sustainable development in the following year. And these are just some of dozens of stories around the world that we see at the grassroots level. At Global Schools, we have a powerful community of committed educators, teachers and volunteers. And we will continue working hard to push forward transformative education at the grassroots level and recognize teachers for their important role as they continue to positively impact their students. This year and last year, educators have been heroes throughout the pandemic, with the switch to online learning and we're proud to be creating a strong network of like-minded people to share best practices and support one another as we create a movement for target 4.7 and transformative education. And thank you so much for listening to my, what I had to share about the Global Schools program and I will now transition into introducing our last two panelists so we can hear additionally about their initiatives on transformative education. First, we will hear from Anita Mwagiru, who is the project lead for the SDG students program at SDSN Youth. She has experience in project management, administration and operations and she has worked with young people in various capacities over the past five years. She is also the chair of the food systems working group at SDSN Youth and has pushed forward initiatives in preparation of a UN food systems summit on behalf of SDSN Youth. Thank you so much, Anita and I will turn it over to you. Thank you so much, Amanda. Thank you for the opportunity to speak about the assistance program and even education as we transition from or have transformative education during this period where many of us our lives have been extremely disrupted by the pandemic. So thank you very much for the invitation and I'm very happy to be here today. So I am the project lead for the SDG students program and I am in charge of a team that runs of various hubs all over the world in every single continent. We have a hundred hubs, as Brighton mentioned earlier, to date with over 80 coordinators running those hubs in various capacities. And in addition to that, we have over 3,700 hub members who are part of our program and this is a year-on-year increase of over 40% which we're very excited about. And just in the last few months, this year alone, we've had over, I think from June this year, we've had over 200 initiatives that have dealt with various SDGs mainly on quality education and mental well-being, especially regarding the COVID pandemic. So I will be talking a little bit about education, especially disruptive and how it has disrupted people's lives, especially for young people all over the world and how they are just adapting and what we need to do to support our young people all over the world. So since early February of last year, more than a billion students have been out of school, some of them who will never be able to return. And this is a generational catastrophe that has erased some of the gains that we have made in the past 25 years through the MDGs and now the SDGs. And this pandemic has hit education systems on many levels and the road to recovery will be long. We have to accept that all the gains that we have made in enrollment, retention and learning may potentially be undone. This pandemic has reiterated how important school is to young people and their families. And has also shown many ways in which the experience of school can change because there are various people who have had to learn school, especially within our program, through radio, through TV. It's been quite a challenge to see how people have adapted, especially over the last year and a half. And as educators and policymakers in all levels and modes of education will agree, there are innumerable frameworks, fields and movements for reforming and transforming educational institutions and systems to fulfill desired visions, goals and objectives of a better world for all peoples, societies and the global community. As countries, communities and schools are emerging and redesigning education and school systems, there is a need for greater equity, access, inclusion and innovation. It's important to keep the most vulnerable in our society at the center of any new design. Only then can we bring real transformation in the way education systems address the needs of the generations to come. As schools prepare to, some are opening, some are kind of confused about where they are at this point. We have to prioritize in the order of enrollment, retention and learning and address the challenges of nutrition, safety and emotional wellbeing before we tackle the inevitable impact of learning. Young people especially have felt the strain of undergoing ever-changing policies without the support and assurances from their governments on how this ends for them. In my country Kenya, we have seen children protest the return to school without proper care, being given to the year they lost as well as their health and wellbeing with minimal COVID restrictions, precautions taken. So more needs to be done in all countries whether they advanced economies or developing or emerging countries to safeguard the needs of children and young people when it comes to education and their futures as they quickly join our workforce that has been affected by the pandemic and economic changes that come with it. We can make a difference for future generations and there is hope. Each of us has the ability to act powerfully for change. Together we can regain what has been lost and build it even better. We need to reimagine an education system that works for all. We know that when we design for those struggling most, we are fair to everyone and everyone benefits. If you take away anything from what I have said in the last few minutes, remember this, all means all. All children and youth need education and until all have equal access to quality education, then we have failed as a global community. Thank you. Thank you so much Anita for sharing that, your work with the 100 hubs around the world and how you envision reimagining the education system. Thank you for providing that speech for us today. I now would like to introduce our next speaker that is going to share about his organization. I would like to introduce DRC Lund. DRC Lund for the past 21 years has experienced more than 90 countries given over 1700 presentations to 150,000 people and worked with leading organizations around the world. His organization Teaspoons of Change focuses on the personal choices, decisions and actions that have a positive impact on people in the planet. So thank you so much for being here with us today and I would like to hand the floor to you. Wonderful, thanks Amanda and thanks to everyone for this opportunity. Good evening from Shanghai. I'm not a native to the land of China but I'm the group head of global citizenship and sustainability for EIM which is education in motion. So Teaspoons of Change for me is mainly around being a concept. And so for me, transformational education is about working towards this understanding that we fit into a global planet. So for me, I've used the UN SDGs since their inception in 2015 and the MDGs before that. But really when we go to people and we talk about sustainable education it's a big thing for us to try and swallow to understand to get our head into. And so Teaspoons of Change tries to be the welcome mat for people to not be afraid of these gigantic goals for us to try and end extreme poverty, reduce in quality and protect our planet but starting with our personal and practical actions at their individual level. And so for me, what I try and do is work with many schools including our Dalic and Der Hong schools here in China. The green schools I work with the Greensquare in Bali and Aotearoa in New Zealand and many, many other hundreds of schools around the world is to try and enhance global literacy and competency. Now as Amanda said, I've been doing this for over 20 years and I used to just kind of be the crazy guy in the corner talking about sustainable development and global citizenship. But it's wonderful that these days we had the minister here, we had the prime minister from Barberos. Professor Sacks has been involved in this for so long. So we're now really finding that this is not just people who care but actually a part of everyday mainstream life. And so what I'm really enthused about is this transformation of seeing that global citizenship isn't just a nice thing to do on the side or something that we do, have a lesson on global citizenship or an Earth Day, put a spotlight on what we're doing but actually making this as a part of who we are. And that's certainly something that we're doing at EIM and others. So to give you some practical examples of how we can transform this understanding and global literacy within our education system, we're actually looking at ESG reporting. So environment, social and governance reporting, which is a very business type thing to do. But even in our junior years, our younger learners, if they can get their head around some of these concepts and some of this vocabulary, they're going to be globally ready from the time that they're 10 years old, et cetera. The other thing that we're doing in all of our schools is carbon mapping. And so we want these real world tools that are being used by business and are in our society and making sure that they become educationalised because I've seen across so many different years and across so many thousands of young people that their actions matter now. Whatever you do as a young person is just as important, just as significant and just as powerful today as it will be in any other time in your life. I've been so privileged to have learned so much from so many young people over so many years. So the other tools I like to use, we've got ESG, we've got things like carbon mapping, but the world's largest lesson. And unfortunately, the minister can't be with us just at the moment, but in Greece, they've been working with the world's largest lesson over many years. They've had over 30,000 children involved in actions around Greece based on this one lesson, looking at the SDGs and how we can take a practical and tangible way of doing things. So a couple of things that I ensure that I'm trying to do is knowing that we have to be the change that you wanna see in the world, but actually we have to be the change that you can't see in the world. And so teaspoons of change tries to give a name to those small and seemingly insignificant things that we do at an individual level and just know that they fit into a bigger and broader context and a collective humanity. So for us, a teaspoon of change of not using your straw, that's great. But actually the biggest thing is about turning off that light. Yes, it saves a little bit of coal here in China or some other places, but it's the fact that you've made the connection between your actions and their impact. And that's significant. And that's what we're seeing more of and more of each and every day and every year of our young people making that connection and knowing that what we do matters. And collectively, working towards this blueprint and this beautiful plan of the SDGs, we can all play our little role and bring that together. So I'm always thrilled to be enjoying these conversations with people from around the world and the Vatican youth symposium here and many others for us to combine our forces at government level, individual level, you know, through different organizations and concepts because I truly believe that small actions multiplied by lots of people can and will create big change. I've been fortunate to see this through polio eradication and some work that I've done and just through our schools and each and every teacher who gains this further growing literacy and competency and global citizenship and bringing it into our everyday lives. So thanks everyone. Amanda, I'll throw it back to you, but fabulous to be a part of this conversation and to hear about all those teaspoons of change that I'm sure are happening around the world at each and every moment. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing everything that your organization is doing. And I actually would like to use this opportunity to ask a question to both you and Anita, one of the questions that is in the chat since we're getting a lot of great conversation here. So we have a question from Purvi Parek and it's about how can we really use the expertise of one individual and showcase this to others? She suggests making an e-library or a digital library. I think this is really a question of scale. How can we get other people involved in this movement that might not be that one interested focal point? So I'd love to hear from both of you, Anita, maybe you can jump in first with maybe a one minute response to that question. But yeah, I think it does help to have a skills library. I think that that is one of the things that in terms of collaboration globally, I feel that is lacking to a certain degree because we do champion the gains that certain different countries or even different programs have done just as teaspoons of change has discussed. But then we don't really have this collected library where we can go and see what has been performed in the future. And then instead of having someone to do the work again, we have it already there and we can just replicate it across different sectors, maybe not in the same exact way but tweak it to the local context. So I definitely do think that an e-library of sorts is very much needed in order for us to learn from the past for certain degree so that we can ensure that our future is made better for all of us. Thank you so much, Anita, for that response. I'll pass it to DRC. Thanks, Amanda. I mean, that's a fabulous question. It's almost been scripted for me beautifully. So I do believe the individual action is where it starts. You know, it's difficult to look outside and see the pollution of the world and think about how insignificant we can be. But, you know, we really only have control over our little slice of life. And with that, you know, what I tell students often is that if we do nothing, nothing can change. That's the only guarantee I can give you. If we do something, I can't guarantee you the world's gonna be wonderful tomorrow. It's probably not, but it's better than doing nothing. So with those odds, that's a fairly pessimistic place to start from but with those odds, you know, we just know that every single action counts. And so I don't want people to feel the burden of the world on their shoulders, but I want people to feel empowered that when they do something and they can make a good choice decision or action, it does fit into a collective context. And so I think individual actions is where it has to start. In terms of libraries and all those sorts of things, they're wonderful. But actually the things that I like the most are sometimes the surprising areas or the unusual suspects or the unusual ways of doing things. So using sport, music, drama, you know, whatever it is that there's already happening in the world and adding just that sustainable or global citizenship lens or layer to those things, I think becomes really powerful. So yeah, I do like ideas that are deliberate and are looking specifically at global citizenship and enhancing that. But I really like the ideas which just sort of are already happening in popular everyday life that just kind of pops up and has a saturation of those small touching points where we hear a little bit of SDGs over here or the global goals here and just that kind of fitting into our normal everyday lives. So yeah, I think that it's a mix of all of those things and everything else, but without doing anything, then not much happens. So the smaller and the more frequent the better. Thank you. I think you did a great job answering that, connecting the individual to kind of the wider community as well. So to close out the session, I would love to ask both of you for a one sentence message that you would like to give to the youth delegates on this call that are youth participating in the Vatican Youth Symposium, any words of encouragement? So Anita, I'll pass it to you. Thank you. I think just from the last of Batakani symposium to this one, the one thing that I can say is the small changes do make a difference. I mean, even within our program, every single initiative builds upon someone learning about various, like one of the STGs or even many of the STGs a lot once. So I think every small action is very important. And if we put all our small actions together, and that means that we are all working together to a collective goal. And that's what's important about all this different, like discussions we're having even at this global platform. I want to highlight the work that our people or our members do. And that's very important so that they can also feel valued and feel cared because sometimes when you're working in a program as large as this in youth, you do kind of get lost in some of the things or initiatives that are happening. But every single initiative matters to us all. So I'm very proud of the work that our coordinators have done and our members as well in their support for them. And let's just keep going. Even as we're going to 20-22, every small action comes. Thank you for that. Every small action counts. I love that piece of advice. DRC will let you have the last word for this piece of advice as well. Yeah, lovely. Thank you. So I think for me it's just knowing that in our small personal choices, decisions and actions that have a positive impact on people on the planet, that contributes to being more active and effective global citizens which contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And so it's almost this cycle that we can move in that knowing those personal actions feeds into people being more active and effective global citizens which feed into those SDGs. And the other thing is to do this in reverse as well. If we want to achieve those Sustainable Development Goals, we need to think as global citizens and act in our personal teaspoons of change or call it whatever you want. So for me, it's that our actions matter and that collectively we can make a difference. So it's certainly worthwhile doing. So small actions multiplied by lots of people creates big change. Thank you so much to both of you for providing your speeches and your interventions today. This is a really enjoyable session on Education for Sustainable Development. I'm now going to pass it back to Brighton to take us into session three on Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Technology. So Brighton, over to you. Thank you so much, Amanda. That was a very incredible conversation specifically about Education for Sustainable Development. And as most of you already know, SDSN Youth does prioritize the fundamental role that innovation plays. That innovation plays in education, that innovation plays in employment creation, that innovation also plays in ensuring that we devise solutions that can help us respond to the challenges that we face. And this session specifically that we are entering into is focusing on innovation. And I'm very excited to welcome our incredible prolific speakers for this session. We have Mr. Samuel Joy, who's the CEO of Hunter. We have Vienu King, the team lead on 2021 Geneva Challenge winner. And we also have Namita Data, who is the head and program manager of the solutions for youth employment. So very excited to welcome you. And I'd like to first begin by introducing Trisanki Saikia. Trisanki Saikia is the project lead for our solutions program here at SDSN Youth. Trisanki is currently pursuing a doctorate studies in Goethe University, that's in Frankfurt. She's interested in climate action, sustainability and research management. She also co-hosts a monthly podcast on local initiatives to tackle sustainable challenges called Logically Local. And is the co-founder of a local initiative in North Eastern India. So as the project lead for SDSN Youth Solutions Program, Trisanki has been leading a global team of project officers to help youth innovators and startups from 170 plus countries working toward achieving their stages. Trisanki, welcome. And I'd like to first begin by inviting you to tell us a little bit more about your work, specifically within the solutions program at SDSN Youth. Thank you, Brighton and hello, everyone. I'm extremely privileged to be part of the panel today and the Vatican Youth Symposium in general. And I will tell you a little bit more about the solutions program, but I would like to begin with saying how important I think platforms like this are to amplify the voices of the youth. Over the last few years, fortunately, the voice of youth has been acknowledged as important and instrumental in supporting sustainable change and supporting the SDGs. And as part of SDSN Youth, I have firsthand witnessed this active engagement of youth in sustainable development efforts. And my greatest aspiration today is that we as a generation can achieve these ambitious targets in our time and not pass on this burden to yet another generation. But how do we do this? The SDGs in general provide a very good starting point and a very good enabling framework for everyone as it already provides a roadmap for the major challenges the world faces, such as inequity, poverty, climate change and so on. And further breaks these down into actionable targets. We have realized that business as usual is not working. Our current practices leaves a lot to be desired. There are a lot of inefficient, expensive and unsustainable approaches and these are the status quo. And these are not helping to solve the big challenges, the big problem. This is where innovation, entrepreneurship and new technology comes in. This is where the youth comes in as they have the ability to bring in fresh practices, processes and products. As the future users of these products and processes, it is fitting that the youth should have a significant role in designing and implementing them. And indeed, various such youth innovations and social entrepreneurs do exist and are working on achieving the various SDGs. Over the last five years, the solutions program at SDS and Youth has worked with hundreds of young entrepreneurs who have attempted to make some change. And I have been personally fortunate to interact with many of them. Our Youth Solutions Report is an annual report which features 50 such promising projects developed and implemented by young people that contribute to achieving the SDGs. These projects and startups come from all over the world and target varied spaces such as education, health, climate change, sanitation and so much here. So much more. Last year, with the COVID pandemic, we saw the resilience of the youth shine through with many innovators in our cohort making changes to their business models to take into account the changing ground realities. Through our interaction with these entrepreneurs over successive cohorts, it has become apparent that they face many barriers in getting their projects off the ground or in scaling them up. Common challenges include gaps in the necessary knowledge or skills, financial constraints and few networking or mentoring opportunities. We have realized that there are several entry barriers and lack of opportunities to learn innovation or social entrepreneurship, especially for young people from the global south. Lack of access to finance, resources, mentorship and a strong network are additional hurdles for young entrepreneurs. Thus, the Innovation Readiness Program, previously known as the Investment Readiness Program was conceptualized. The IRP attempts to provide an enabling environment which fosters innovation and develops the requisite skill set in youth to design, implement and grow their social ventures. The curriculum of this 16-week acceleration program is complemented with individual mentorship from industry experts to help young entrepreneurs to effectively develop and validate a clear impact investment proposal that is aligned with the SDG framework. I am very pleased to announce that currently we have applications open for the fifth edition of our Innovation Readiness Program. And if any of the conference participants are interested and have any social venture or have a social entrepreneur in their network, then we encourage you to go to our website www.solutions.report and apply in the link provided there. So as you can see that the Solutions Program already has various elements through which we want to provide a more enabling environment for the young innovators. And going forward, we want to provide more opportunities for young entrepreneurs to the Solutions Program. That means more knowledge and skills, better mentorship and guidance, a wider network. The right resources and access to finance are areas we want to improve on and provide more to our innovators. And this is not something I only aspire for the Solutions Program. This is something I aspire that all organizations and institutions help to create this enabling environment for the youth. Because I think the most important thing young entrepreneurs need today is trust and belief. The trust and belief that they are capable and the support which comes along with that. This is my desire that institutions and organizations provide the resources required for the youth innovation to flourish because youth innovation and entrepreneurship is crucial for sustained and sustainable development. With this, I end my part and give the ball back to Brighton. And I look forward to hearing from all the esteemed speakers today. Thank you so much, Trisanki. That was a very prolific background to what we believe innovation does in the context of STGs. But also what we are doing within STS in youth. And I would like to equally invite you to look up our call for applications to join the next cohort of our Innovation Readiness Program. It's going to provide unique opportunities for you to innovate within the solutions that you are leading in your organization, in your university, or in your work. Also, something that you spoke about, Trisanki, most importantly, was around the road that innovation plays what technology can do to be able to leapfrog our journey to innovation. And I'm also very excited today to be joined by Veenu King, who happens to be the team leader from the 2021 Geneva Challenge Project Bye Bye. Veenu is the CEO of Uwex and team leader, as I described with the 2021 Geneva Challenge and happens to be an entrepreneur with experience as a data science, as a data science team leader, a consultant, and ideator. Our corporate career expands over several industries, including Internet of Things, Retail, Semiconductors. Veenu is currently completing her master's at Yale University and Environmental Management, and she's extremely invested in the utilization of novel technologies to build sustainable products. And in the context of our discussion today, Veenu, I'm very keen to understand your perspective around the role of innovation and technology in responding to the challenges posed by the sustainable development goals. I would love to answer that. So actually, just to give some background, my team and I, it's a collaboration between Stanford University and Yale University. We competed in the 2021 Geneva Challenge, and the theme of the challenge was crisis management. The crisis we had picked was air pollution and specifically air pollution around crop stubble burning. And we thought through, you know, why is this happening? Why is this such a big deal? And we saw the stats that in your DALA, 50,000 people had died from air pollution alone, I think a year or two ago. And of that pollution, 40% came from crop stubble burning in Punjab, which is where my family's from. And Punjab is also where the farmers are burning the crop stubble that ends up going to New Delhi. So we've kind of tackled this problem, looking at stakeholder engagement, grassroots movements, you know, why aren't the incentives aligned? Also please forgive me in advance, recovering from a cold. And what we found was a lack of distrust in the government and the current systems. The solutions that were available were expensive. And so our position in this as entrepreneurs was to think, okay, well, what can we do to provide easy access to something that realigns these incentives to create a more sustainable world? And so we came up with Bye Bye, which is a marketplace solution for digital byproducts. And there's marketplaces for almost everything in the world nowadays, but there wasn't anything for agricultural byproducts, which meant that there was a gap that needed to be addressed. And so we came in proposing this idea and it worked really well. Easier for farmers to use in terms of how their marketplace was designed, easier for buyers to find centralized suppliers. So really it was a circular economy approach for industry to get reusable materials and for farmers to get autonomy, financial security. And so to your question about innovation and entrepreneurship, and if we see innovation as a link between two spaces, that hasn't been made before, then what we're providing is innovations providing is a new perspective. And part of the equation is also entrepreneurship, which I say is like the courage to pursue something as well as the act of implementing a innovative solution. Now these two together do create change, whether good or bad, to create the sustainable progressive change we're looking for. You know, we need innovation to have sustainability deeply integrated into the founding framework. And we need entrepreneurs with these sustainable solutions to have access to funding to implement it at the scale that it needs to be done to have an impact. And so, you know, that's how I see entrepreneurship and innovation coming hand in hand and how we did that through the Geneva challenge. Thank you so much. And congratulations once more on being a part of the Geneva challenge and proposing all these novel solutions to addressing the challenges that we're currently facing around sustainability. I think it's extremely important because I think businesses need to innovate, organizations need to innovate for them to remain relevant, but also to be able to contribute to reducing emissions. But at the same time, this takes me to the connection that exists between innovation, sustainability, and the bargaining youth and employment globally. It's quite interesting to realize that one in four young people around the world might not have the opportunity to have a job opportunity that gives them over 1.5 United States dollars in a day. So you discover that there's a huge gap that continues to persist around youth and employment. And at this stage, I would like to take us to the Middle East, specifically Dubai, where our colleague Samuel Joy is currently sitting. And before I ask the question, I would like to provide a very brief biography to what Samuel does and his interests. Samuel Joy is the founder and CEO of Hunter. And Hunter is the next-gen recruiting platform, instantly matching employers with a curated community of best global healthcare talent. Currently, Hunter works with some of the best largest healthcare companies in the Middle East that hire thousands of healthcare workers. Prior to his entrepreneurial journey, Samuel Joy implemented digital transformation projects for the Emirates Group and has become a competent startup founder who has graduated from Newtrip Accelerator from Austin, United States. Welcome, Samuel. And I'd like to find out from your experience having worked with Emirates Group and now leading Hunter, which is creating job opportunities for so many young people around the world. How do you see the connection that exists between job creation, innovation in the context of sustainable development goals? Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Brighton. Thank you, Mr. Brighton. So, dear Professor Geoffrey Sacks, Mr. Brighton and his Excellency Monsignor Marcelo Sanchez, thank you for inviting me here today. And to all distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is a true pleasure for me to be here to talk about youth innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology. As Brighton mentioned, I am the founder and CEO of Hunter. The vision of Hunter is a reduction of modern-day slavery in alignment with the UN Sustainable Goal No. 8. So, let me start by telling you the story of Sonia, a single mother who graduated from a healthcare university in southern India. Like countless millions like her, Sonia paid her recruitment agency $6,000, which would normally put her and her family into an unbreakable debt trap. To a shock, she discovered that there was no job ending up working as a household. In this time of desperation, she discovered Hunter. Hunter is the next-gen recruiting platform that instantly matches employers with a curated community of the best global healthcare and blue-collar talent. Our solution is a digital AI-based marketplace that democratizes access to healthcare workers. This saves the job seeker at least six months of salary, which they would have otherwise paid to the manpower recruiters, while in pursuit of a better life for their families in a foreign shore. A few Asian and African governments having understood the power of technology have signed MOUs with us to address the problem of abuse during migrations. The MOU focuses on decent work and economic growth, reduced inequalities, peace, justice and strong institutions by providing a transparent and straightforward international recruiting process through our patented technology platform. The government of Kerala, a state in South India, is facing, in recent history, the reverse migration of its skilled and non-skilled migration population, approximately one million of whom return due to COVID. And the population is responsible for nearly a fifth of the foreign remittance to India. And to address this problem, the government has partnered with us to use Hunter's Technology to a Marketplace to align employment opportunities in the Middle East with this able workforce. So we've been tasked with the responsibility for 100,000 vetted users. We have seen technology-based disruption in many industries' names. You would have probably be very familiar with us, such as Uber, Airbnb, but technology is yet to disrupt how our largest resource of human capital is aligned to job markets. I'm going to discuss some of the internal and external strategies that can be implemented in your innovative solutions. Advance a team culture that helps people experience their work as neither ultimate, nor transactional, but a purposeful and relational. Develop each other far and beyond their contribution to the business. Our business model should optimize for measurable value that shares with customers and partners, not just captured for business and its owners. We should go through partnerships of mutuality and integrity, avoiding a zero-sum view that only considers our organizational priorities. We treat our investors, suppliers, distributors, and all partners as we would like to be treated, considering the needs, pressures, and health of their business and communities. I have a vision that God has blessed me with that has taken birth due to support of some incredible investors, advisors, stakeholders. So I encourage young entrepreneurs to invite advisors who have a wealth of knowledge and experience in services, programs, brands, and experience that renew culture to be more humanizing, truthful, beautiful, and sustainable. We will all take part of the cultural benefits of having more of the next generation's most able minds focused on solution to consequential problems. Now, innovation to me is finding existing systems that are exploitative and enable or widespread harm and replacing the entire process with a redemptive system that progresses even flourishing. So this is my greatest aspiration to all the youth that have come here today. Find your own Sonya story. The journey is not going to be easy, but nothing worthwhile has ever been. So find mentors who are visionaries, but be courageous and dream big. Dreams of changing the world for our future generation are collective dreams of the power to impact our nations and beyond. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm excited to learn about the incredible work that you are doing and how you're using Internet of Things and innovation to be able to respond to the barge on our youth employment. I'm very excited in the context of the backdrop you've provided to also bring in our partner, a partner of STS in youth and our dear friends, Namita Data, who is the head and program manager of Solutions for Youth Employment. So just as a background, the Solutions for Youth Employment is a stakeholder global program that provides thought leadership and creates innovations on the agenda of youth employment. Solutions for Youth Employment brings together multilateral, bilateral, donor organizations, 40 private sector companies, 50 large NGOs, think tanks and youth themselves. As the program manager of Solutions for Youth Employment, she has led several thought leadership products on the agenda of digital jobs, the role of technology, gender and inclusion. Before taking over the role of program manager, she was global head of let's work, a global program on jobs and private sector created by the IFC. She has led multiple sectoral operations on jobs at the country level in several regions including Africa, Western Balkans and Asia. She also worked as secretary of the Department of Hub and Development, Power and Environment in India and she holds a PhD from Cornell University and MIA from Columbia University and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management. Very excited to have you on the meter and we are very happy at SDSN Youth to be partners with you. My interest in the work that the Solutions for Youth Employment does is from the context of inclusion. We have seen how with the COVID-19 pandemic women have been disproportionately affected in terms of access to jobs and access to technologies and access to education. How do you see the role of inclusion and the role of creating jobs as a lever in addressing and responding to the sustainable development goals? Thank you. Thank you, Brighton and thanks a lot for inviting me to this event. So you already mentioned, so as for why it's based in the World Bank, so I work in the World Bank and the reason we created it is because it brings together a large number of partners, NGOs, private companies, young people, foundations because we in the World Bank realize that this problem of youth employment is not something one organization, even a large one like the World Bank cannot solve on our own. It really needs several types of agencies, organizations and young people themselves to come together. So when you reached out to me and you described what this event is going to look like, I was just thinking that I really like the three words that you picked for this session. That's youth innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology. And I was just thinking that if we were to think about the hardest development problems in the world, whether it's poverty, whether it's climate change, whether it's access to drinking water, just about any persistent development problem, the three ingredients you want in that recipe when you create a solution are actually all are the three things that you mentioned, which is youth innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology. I think those are three things that are going to be increasingly important when we think about solution to about any development challenge. But particularly from a youth employment perspective, and I'll just maybe make like three points and then we can have a discussion, particularly on the topic that you wanted, which is on inclusion. So why do I think innovation is important? And this is actually one of the key things that in SRI we focus on, just innovation. Number one, innovation is important because business as usual just hasn't worked. It hasn't worked. I mean, we've done a lot of impact assessments of youth employment programs, and we find that actually two-thirds of them do not have any impact. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money invested in programs that were not able to have much impact on ground. So clearly we need to be thinking differently. We need to be experimenting. We need to be taking risks. We need to be trying new things. And the second reason I think innovation is important is because the world around us is changing very, very rapidly. I like the acronym VUCA to describe how the world of work is changing. It's volatile, it's uncertain, it's complex, and it's ambiguous. VUCA, I think it just sums up the world we live in, right? And so when things are changing so rapidly, just to keep up and keep solving the problems, the long problems, but also the new problems that are coming up. The problems that don't even exist today but are going to come up as we go ahead in this rapidly changing world. We've got to be innovative. And I think how firms are organizing production, the boundaries between firms is just rapidly collapsing. Hiring practices in firms is changing from full-time jobs to part-time jobs to contract workers to gig jobs. This is changing so rapidly. And education systems frankly just haven't kept up. They're very, very outdated and ancient and simply not able to respond right now. So a lot needs to happen. So I think innovation is not just in terms of grand design, but also in terms of designing specific programs, super important. Secondly, I think the role of technology is just really important. It's not just important for young people to know how to read and write, but digital skills I think are absolutely foundational, simply not just to get a job, but simply to survive in the 21st century, to interact with your friends, to interact with the government, to get information from the government. Even if you're a farmer, you need to have some digital skills to be able to access crop prices. Even if you want to be an Uber driver, you need to be able to look at a digital map, right? So simply to survive in the 21st century, you've got to have digital skills. And this is something that we as for Ryan in the World Bank are really trying to address this digital divide. And you talked about inclusion. This is so important and we've seen that in COVID that the inequality in the world was further exacerbated by the digital divide. And this is further exacerbated by the fact that women don't have access to sort of digital tools and the internet. Young people with disabilities get left out. People in rural areas get left out. So I think that technology can be a solution provider. I think we can use technology. We recently did some work on youth with disabilities. And we find that there are so many interesting new digital assistive devices, like text to speech to text transcription or keyboards that have Braille. I think some of these new things that technology is bringing up can help level the playing field in terms of certain types of inequalities. And of course they'll create new inequalities too, but we've got to be able to use technology as a critical ingredient in terms of thinking about solutions. And the last point I want to make is that I think we've got to move away from thinking, particularly when you think about youth employment, you think, ah, that's a problem. Yes, it's a problem, but I think youth are not just a problem. They are part of the solution. They're actually actively part of the solution. One of the favorite parts about my job is that we have created something called a youth advisory group. And you guys in the SDSN have helped us find innovative youth, entrepreneurial youth who are creating just fascinating solutions. This young person in Sierra Leone who worked three years with garbage and has created the first solar power car completely run on solar energy out of garbage. I was fascinated just to hear him and it's so rewarding and enriching when you hear about young people creating solutions too. And I could just go on and on in terms of just the types of initiatives that these youth are leading. I'll stop here, but I'll probably just quickly make one sort of more less optimistic type remark. And that is that the fact that the world is changing so rapidly. I think one thing we forget is when we talk about skills for youth, we talk about digital, we talk about reading, writing, the right kind of skills, creative skills, teamwork skills. One skill that young people are going to need more of and we often ignore it is emotional resilience or simply the ability to bounce back, to bounce back from a setback, to bounce back from failure and to bounce back from any obstacle they might be facing. So we did this recent research because we are finding that while things are changing so rapidly and education systems were disrupted during COVID, jobs were not there during COVID or young entrepreneurs setting up businesses that are failing. Mental health really took it all, particularly for young people. It really took it all and we don't talk about this very often. So emotional resilience, just the skill of I will bounce back no matter what. I think is something that our education systems need to be talking about, parents and communities need to be talking about and really helping young people build that skill of resilience. Maybe not such an optimistic note to end on but I think it's just very important as we move ahead. Thank you so much, Namita. That was a very good way of really tying in the two elements that are critical from the perspective of employment creation as well as innovation and how these are interdependent. I think Albert Einstein kept reminding us that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them and I think that's where innovation comes in. How do we begin to think innovatively, create a culture of innovation even as we think about creating jobs and as we think about collaborating to expand our abilities to offer opportunities to others and personally I see innovation as the ability to see change as an opportunity and not as a threat and I believe that all of us who've been part of this session have seen how all these different connections of innovation, entrepreneurship and technology work together as interdependence. In conclusion, I would like to pose this question to all of you. When you think about the three key elements we've discussed, entrepreneurship, innovation and job creation for youth. What is your greatest aspiration for youth innovation and entrepreneurship in this decade of action? I'll give you 30 seconds each to share your greatest aspiration. I'll begin with Trisanki. I think I already spoke about my greatest aspiration that our generation we do not pass on the burden to the next generation to achieve the SDGs but also again rehashing the importance of innovation which Dr. Namita Datta also said. Break the status quo. I think we need more innovation. There are a lot of inefficiencies in our current systems and the only way we could change that is through more innovation. So don't stop. Excellent. Excellent. I'll follow the same order. I think it's been mentioned that technology is critical for progress and my biggest aspiration for youth today is to utilize that in a different way than how it has been used. I think a lot of young people are in spaces that knowledge is growing very quickly. Not everyone can keep up but as youth we have that access and we need to be able to utilize it in a way that makes the effective change. Other than not being indifferent I think taking action on this knowledge that we have been raised in and are born into living in the world with that lens I think would be a good one. Amir. Yeah, I think I mentioned mine as well which is innovation to me is finding existing systems that are exploitive and basically replacing the entire process with a redemptive system that progresses human flourishing by using technology and to me that is my greatest aspiration to all the young entrepreneurs out here. Amir. I would probably say creativity of youth unleashed. You know we recently did this research on looking at creative sectors like dance and drama and music and art as not just a source of jobs for young people but also as a means of empowerment giving voice to what you think and feel through acts which are creative but I think beyond the creative sectors also just creativity in solving a problem and I think our youth are enormously creative and you want that creative energy to just bubble up and be unleashed. So in a sentence I would just say creativity among youth unleashed for me that's what I would like to see. Excellent, thank you so much and I would like to say that without change there is no innovation there is no creativity or incentive for improvement those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable. I'm very grateful that all of you could create the time to be with us today to share all your incredible and prolific thoughts, your clarity of thoughts, your ability to speak accurately and share the work that you are doing is extremely impeccable to SDSN youth and to all of us who are joining the sessions today. I'd like to equally invite all of you joining us to share your impressions with us on social media. The hashtag is VYS 2021 so tell us where you are joining us from, tell us what you've learned, type all those quotes online tag SDSN youth, tag solutions for youth employment, tag Hunter and tag all the partners that have joined us today. We also are excited to extend an opportunity like this to all of you. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'd like to invite my colleagues to be able to provide a little bit more information and context into how the break over sessions will look like moving forward. Thank you and I would like to also remind you that tomorrow the symposium continues. We have exciting speakers, we have exciting sessions and we want to continue sharing your experiences and impressions with us. I'd like to equally thank all the participants from the innovation session. We are grateful and we look forward to collaborating with you as we set our priorities and ambitions for 2021. Thank you and I wish you a pleasant rest of the symposium. Thank you so much Brighton and like he mentioned, thank you to all of our speakers who joined us today. Thank you again to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and to the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network for helping us to host our 8th annual symposium here digitally in 2021. We will be back here tomorrow at 8 a.m. Eastern time. Our session will be on Human Rights, Dignity and the Good Samaritan as well as on our common home which will discuss sustainable cities and communities as well as our closing session in which we will be having a brand new initiative of SDSN youth that has to do with funding and financing. We hope to see you back here tomorrow and we hope to see you in our networking sessions that are happening right after this. If you need the information it is in the chat. It will start in about 10 minutes. Again, thank you so much. We hope to see you back here tomorrow and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.