Youth Empowerment: Time to Take Action

Two important events took place last week, and one of them confirmed that the young generation is taking action to change the world.

School Strike for Climate

First, youth in more than 2,000 cities in 100 countries joined the global youth climate strike and challenged politicians to take decisive action on climate change. Maybe you were among them.

The message was clear: youth is the future and has the power to improve things for good.

Here are some of the best protest banners from last Friday:

The ocean is rising, so are we
If the planet was cool, I’d be at school
March now or swim later
Raise your voice, not the sea level
The climate is changing, why aren’t we?
No money on a dead planet
We are skipping lessons so we can teach you one
We, the youth, want you to panic
Don’t burn our future
There is more ice in cocktails than in the North Pole

The Web’s Birthday

Second, the World Wide Web turned 30.

On the occasion of the anniversary of one of the most influential inventions of our time, various panels were held with the CERN team that worked with Tim Berners-Lee when he invented the Web. During those online Q-A sessions, someone asked:

Anything that I am developing today has been done a million times in various ways. What was the inspiration to start working on the WWW standard? Was there a lot of prior work to build on or was it all from scratch.

Web pioneer and entrepreneur Jean-François Groff answered: Do not worry about stuff having been done a million times already. The Web was considered primitive junk by hypertext experts; we got rejected from the Hypertext 1991 conference. Whatever you’re working on, if it solves a real problem that has frustrated you, it’s useful. Great inventions like the web are only obvious in hindsight.

The message is clear if you really want to improve something, the little things that you will do are going to help make a change.

If you don’t know where to start and how to convey your vision, the online-training at the Entrepreneurship Campus will help you to build an entrepreneurial mindset.

“Successful entrepreneurial designs are often innovative without inventing anything new. The innovation lies in re-combination,” Professor Gunter Faltin highlights in one of the lessons.

The Entrepreneurship Campus goal is to provide exposure to entrepreneurship to everyone that thinks about taking this path, especially to young people living in developing countries.
Everyone who has an idea deserves to have a chance to develop it into a reality.
The Youth Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition is your chance to get started as a young entrepreneur and to help empower your peers.