After the success of Millennium Development Goals, global leaders adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to eliminate all types of global problems from this world. These goals will address problems like health, education, social security and job opportunities and also will help to ensure an economic growth. Young Sustainable Impact (YSI) is an organisation that brings the best young entrepreneurial minds of this world under a roof. They focus on finding solutions of the problems addressed by SDGs. 'Empower youth to solve the sustainability challenges by creating measurable impacts' is the main vision of this organisation.
This year YSI Bangladesh has started its journey as a local partner of YSI Global. YSI Global received more than 10,000 applications in 2017 from 170 countries around the world. Among them, only 25 were selected for the second round. Finally, only five teams got the ultimate license to work as YSI Local, YSI Bangladesh is one of them. The other four teams are from China, South Korea, Canada and Singapore.
Currently YSI Bangladesh is getting prepared for 'Entrepreneur Conference 2018'. This conference will be a golden opportunity for young entrepreneurs from all over the country where they will come forward with their bright ideas and models and work as a team to solve the major problems that we face in our everyday life. Here the young minds will receive world-class education on entrepreneurship, will be in touch with top level mentors in related fields, four- day full free camp to enrich and train themselves and finally share their innovative ideas and get primary funding from investors to materialise their ideas in a broader way.
They will start accepting applications in January from all over Bangladesh and the selection phase will conclude in three rounds. After the final round, 10 teams will be selected and they will be working throughout this time for the challenges ahead. In February, before the main conference, the teams will conduct their operation in three phases: a. Problem identification relating problems to SDG, b. determining priority SDG and c. prototype building based on priority SDG. Local mentors and startup experts will be there to provide assistance. These teams will finish building the prototypes within this month and will display them in the main conference.
In March 2018, the main event 'YSI Global Entrepreneur Conference 2018' will take place. From the event, based on performance and motivation behind the prototypes built by the participant teams, the local judges and YSI headquarter will announce the five top teams. These top teams will present their models to the investors, company heads and CEO on the day of Investor's Pitch.
YSI headquarter will receive up to date information about every day's event progress. Also, YSI and YSI Bangladesh will manage the selection of applicants. Bangladesh Science Society will play the role of organiser, while Sahatech, an IT firm based in Dhaka, will be in charge of technical support. Youth Carnival, a youth organisation based in Dhaka, will be a partner of this event.
Suman Saha, the country ambassador of YSI Bangladesh, hopes that this will be a very effective platform for young entrepreneurs of our country who have a lot of innovative ideas but do not know how to implement them. He appreciated YSI for this initiative and also thanked Bangladesh Science Society and Youth Carnival for becoming partners to this event.
The writer is studying in Computer Science and Engineering Department at American International University of Bangladesh (AIUB). He can be reached at [email protected]
