Challenge goes Global
March 12th, 2009 by ochukoI was lucky enough to attend the final for the Central and South East Asia Enterprise challenge yesterday – a British Council/Make your Mark collaboration following on from Global Entrepreneurship Week, involving thirty young people from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
The event took place (appropriately!) at Shakespeare’s Globe. It was truly inspiring to see the participating young people, having been fired up by a GEW event taking forward their enthusiasm and coming up with tangible solutions to the problems faced by their communities.
After pitching their ideas to a panel including Tim Campbell and Iqbal Wahab –the overall winner was the Pakistan team, who picked up a whopping £2,500 prize cheque!
Their winning idea was an integrated waste management system to collect organic household waste from around the city (and to convert it into gas, organic fertilizer/biocompost and electricity. Amazingly, considering the idea was first conceived in November last year, the project is already underway and the team will use the prize money to expand the business. 20% of their profits go to producing sustainable shopping bags for the city as overuse of plastic bags is currently a real problem.
Clichéd perhaps – but they are all winners in my eyes, and the fact that many of the young people chose to present in English was pretty amazing considering it was the first time out of their country for them all. I wonder how many of us would have been able to do the same in a foreign country!
Doubly inspiring was the impact of Global Entrepreneurship week with the team’s teacher Sohail Abbas Kjokkar saying: “Global Entrepreneurship Week encouraged my students to solve an important problem in our city and gave them the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities.”
The team members described the trip to London as “a dream and a great learning experience which will give us a vision for life” with one of the team Farida Siddiq noting the highlight of the visit for her as a master class with our very own Sabirul Islam Make Your Mark ambassador and entrepreneur who started his web design business at just 14.
Judge Tim Campbell, said to the teams: “We have learned about some of the issues you have to face in your countries and were incredibly impressed by the passion you displayed. This challenge was about you learning that business is at the heart of social change and we hope that you will take this important message back to your communities”
I couldn’t agree more!
Well done to the Pakistani team, and all the participants.
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