One Young World Ambassadors are leading projects in every country of the world, creating substantial social impact across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Every month our Coordinating Ambassadors select someone from their region who has created significant social impact locally, regionally or even worldwide. We are delighted to feature a selection of these exceptional young leaders below. If you would like to be considered, please reach out directly to your Coordinating Ambassador. Unsure who is your Coordinating Ambassador? See the breakdown of countries here
Gulnahar Mahbub Monika, Bangladesh – Deshi Ballers
Gulnahar founded Deshi Ballers with the goal of empowering women through sport and providing them with a platform. The organisation works with women of all ages through various programmes. Deshi Baller’s initial aim was to introduce the sport of basketball to children a sport-sampling project. Since then it has run an educational, sports training programme called ‘Leaders on Court’, held an annual tournament in celebration of International Women’s Day, hosted a Camp with Jaago Schools for underprivileged children, and organised a Boot Camp Workout. These are just a few examples of the projects run by the organisation, which ultimately aims to inaugurate the first ever national women’s basketball league in Bangladesh by 2024 and to make the sport inclusive and accessible to everyone.
During lockdown induced by the pandemic, Deshi Ballers has engaged its community with virtual activities, such as the “Huddle”, and a “Fitness Boot Camp at Home”. Another recent development is the selection of five Deshi Ballers’ U18 players by the U.S. Department of State for the Youth Sports & Women's Empowerment Program 2020.
Ayano Sasaki, Japan - MIRACT
Ayano was inspired by the One Young World community of Ambassadors and the Summit, which raised the questions: “what future do we want for society and how can one contribute to that?” In response Ayano has developed her non-profit, MIRACT, which provides high school students with a progressive career guidance in an innovative manner. The network of young leaders who make up the One Young World Community has also provided an invaluable resource of expertise and information exchange, which has helped Ayano to build the team and its culture.
Examples of the work the organisation have carried out include a bi-weekly, online round-table discussion, a regional conference in Kyushu which was attended by 150 participants, and a platform for young people living in said region to share information and mould their community.
Aprilya Lestari, Indonesia - Genashtim Innovative Learning
Genashtim certified as Bcorps with the mission of Genashtim Innovative Learning is to leverage technology to connect marginalised communities to the global economy and help businesses to operate more effectively. It does so by providing online learning services for executive education and language proficiency, as well as remote PC support and surveillance.
Based in Singapore, Genashtim is a social enterprise that promotes an inclusive approach to employment, which it describes as ‘beyond CSR’. Our operation is 100% remote work. More than 100 permanent staff across 10 countries. 60% Person With Disability, 25% refugee and 5% senior citizen. This model emphasises that given the appropriate working environment, they are equally productive workers. By harnessing assistive technologies such as screen readers and e-speaking software, and adopting a flexible approach to employment practices, Genashtim employees can work independently and productively. Other sustainable practices aim to minimise the organisation’s resource consumption and emissions.
Edith Soria, Mexico - Create Purpose México
Edith is the President at Create Purpose, an organisation which provides sustainable and equitable community development through educational programs for children and adolescents in vulnerable situations.
Create Purpose México has developed four programmes for children and adolescents living in orphanages, as well as for their caretakers. The Garden-Based Learning Program teaches participants how to grow organic food in a sustainable way in an urban environment, benefiting their personal health and the environment. The Technology-Based Learning Program seeks to provide participants with ‘technological mastery’. The Child Care, Neurodevelopment and Wellbeing Program educates participants to foster a supporting and enriching environment for girls, boys, and adolescents. The final is a Nutrition, Health and Wellbeing Program, that seeks to improve the diet of orphans and vulnerable children through healthy, affordable, accessible menus, personalised to mitigate against non-communicable diseases in later life.
Alejandro Daly, Colombia - El Derecho a No Obedecer
El Derecho a No Obedecer is a social platform that proposes, develops, and supports citizen advocates, and aims to escalate their impact. The aim is to increase youth participation to achieve greater impacts on unjust realities, such as xenophobia, air pollution, assassination of social leaders and the criminalisation of protest.
The platform has organised over 200 ‘conversation spaces’, gathering government officials, academics, and citizens to discuss unjust realities in Colombia’s cities. This has helped to mobilise more than 7,000 people. Moreover, the team has led 25 local and 8 national mobilisations that have generated national and international attention, such as “Rostros de la Migración” and “Aquí Cabemos Todos”. The team organises an annual “Cultural and Artistic Programme for Integration in Latin America” to promote social integration of refugees and migrants in Colombia and the region. The second incarnation of this event took place in June. Within this event’s agenda, organisations promoted conversations to reflect on migration, alongside artistic and cultural displays to fight against xenophobia engaging more than 115.000 people in social media with messages of integration.
Yasemin Sharityar, Switzerland - Bühler Climate Week
Looking for ways to create impact in a corporate environment, Yasemin initiated the Bühler Climate Week as part of “Generation B”, an internal movement at Bühler. The purpose of Generation B is to bring employees together to create the company people want to work for. Generation B was founded after Bühler sent their first ambassadors to the OYW Summit in 2016. The aim of the Climate Week was to give participants the chance to develop a holistic understanding of climate change and show them ways how they can contribute to mitigating its effects. The event was lead by Yasemin and her colleague Abdulqadir Abshir, and supported by an engaged team of Bühler employees.
The Bühler Climate Week consisted of a series of events. From calculating personal carbon footprints, to exploring how entire industries can do to be more sustainable, the event addressed various topics with global speakers from a diverse range of backgrounds. During the pandemic, the world’s gaze has been diverted from the urgent and ever-present climate crisis. Therefore, the team wanted to bring climate change back into the spotlight and inspire individuals inside and outside of Bühler to make a change.
Amil Khanzada, USA/Japan – Virufy
Virufy is developing a universal COVID-19 test which uses an accessible smartphone app. Using cutting-edge artificial intelligence, the app analyses cough sounds to identify the COVID-19 signature in users. The goal is to achieve medical-grade accuracy and provide a solution for humanity to replace expensive testing and end lockdowns.
The team has gathered clinical data of over three thousands coughs to train AI algorithms with hospital research approval. This critical mass of data has allowed them to develop a prototype of the algorithm with above 70% sensitivity. To drive up accuracy to the 95% mark required for medical device approval in the US, they are focused on collecting more cough data to refine and train the algorithms. The diverse, youth-run volunteer team has over thirty members from 15+ universities and is reaching out to COVID-19 testing centres and hospitals around the world. The group is supported by crucial groups at Stanford, including the COVID-19 Innovation Response Lab and Hacking for Recovery.
Fatema Husain, Bahrain – One Percent
Since attending the OYW Summit in Bogotá, Fatema’s perspective was shifted towards a focus on sustainability. As a result, she joined one% as the Community Manager, a volunteering platform to connect potential volunteers with opportunities to assist sustainable initiatives.
The long-term and extremely ambitious goal of the organisation is to encourage and enable a billion people to donate 1% of their time for good causes. To achieve this, it is bringing back a culture of volunteering which it hopes to engrain in people’s lifestyles. It does so by enabling and encouraging registrants on the app to volunteer all year round, with the convenience offered by the one% app. In Bahrain only, since it was launched, we have gathered over 508 volunteering events and 4522 volunteering hours.
Obinna Victor Eze, Nigeria - 360degreehealth Network
Victor founded the 360degreehealth Network to bridge the gap in Nigeria’s healthcare delivery through medical outreach and healthcare financing. The initiative engages the government through advocacy to form policies that subsidise the cost of health services. Victor and the team have organised health campaigns in underserved communities, worked with healthcare providers and community volunteers to organise health awareness campaigns, research, health education, free drug distribution, and run vaccination programs that have served an average of 22,000 people since 2016.
Following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic the organisation changed its community health intervention work to focus towards Covid-19 intervention. Victor’s project called ''Protecting Frontline Health workers to Zero Covid 19'' provides health education about COVID 19 in 53 languages to local communities in Nigeria through the media. The educational programme provides training for healthcare workers on the frontline in emergency preparedness for the management of infectious diseases. Additionally, the team has provided PPE to 5,000 health workers in Nigeria.
Yaakoub Benarab, Algeria - SNAI3I صنايعي
Yaakoub, as the CEO and Co-founder of SNAI3I, aims to enhance the imagination of the next generation, by leading an organisation that provides an education beyond that which schools and formal institutions offer. Said education has the purpose of providing children who participate with the necessary skills and abilities to prosper in the future economy and wider society.
SNAI3I’s curriculum is designed to offer high-tech, innovative courses to achieve this goal. However, the education is also more basic and fundamental than is implied. It involves the essential education of “how to think and learn”, which is essential in creating the leaders of tomorrow, and in turn generate positive change for humanity and the world. Over 150 children have participated in their classes, which have been held online since the lockdown resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Shuwel Ahmed, Switzerland - Pupils to Professionals
Pupils to Professionals gives young people around the world an opportunity to build both soft and technical skills, receive mentorship and connect with leaders. The organisation offers these opportunities to students who lack easy access to them otherwise, but have the academic potential to use the experience as a springboard to greater achievements.
Pupils to Professionals supports students through 2 pillars: Career workshops & Work experience opportunities. Firstly, the career workshops for under-represented students helps them to idealize their future life, and get to grips with which roles and career paths will get them there. Secondly, Pupils to Professionals provide work experience opportunities connecting student groups & schools with multi-national organizations, during this experience, they learn about the many different areas within a company and hear from the leaders about the different career paths available to them, providing them also with the experience of connecting with global and local leaders of business. As of January 2020, 43 students from Europe and Africa have completed the work experience programme, in addition to a further 570 students from the UK who have participated in career workshops.
Danielle Ogeda, Brazil - O cuidado começa por você
Danielle designed the strategy and is leading on communications for a strategy to mobilize and prepare leadership team to increase awareness and support regarding mental health. This is all within her organisation, One Young World’s partner Johnson & Johnson.
The ambition of this project is to increase awareness about all tools and resources that the company already provides to its work force to support their Mental Health needs. This comes in the form of trainings, Employee Resource Groups, and a free professional support channel for employees and families. Besides that, the Human Resources team implemented a specific six-month program training for Janssen Brazil Leaders to support them to improve their understanding of Mental Health.
Interested in learning more about Ambassador projects around the world? Check out our Impact page to learn about how young leaders in the One Young World Community are leading the charge towards the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.