Innovating for Youth in Mexico, Haiti, Sierra Leone

Three teams of young World Bank staff are using innovative approaches to solve development challenges in Mexico, Haiti and Sierra Leone, thanks to grants from the  Youth Innovation Fund. The projects aim to use South-South knowledge exchange and technology to empower youth in developing countries.

Eco-Friendly Classrooms in Mexico

Four young staff worked as a team to design a project to help Mexican communities establish environmentally friendly classrooms.

The team will produce a social collaboration website on a wiki platform, with tutorials on building and running eco-friendly classrooms. Their partners are Anahuac University, and Construyendo, a local nongovernmental organization (NGO) in the low-income municipality of Huixquilucan, Mexico.

The platform will allow practitioners from all over the world share proven grassroots-level innovation with communities that may not have otherwise known about it.

“We hope to make a decisive impact in a very poor community in Mexico, through the construction of classrooms,” says David Argente, a member of the team.

Enouraging Young Entrepreneurs in Haiti

Svetlana Goubanova believes that connecting young Haitians in Haiti to Haitians living abroad can have a strong impact.

Her project will help connect resources and knowledge within the Haitian diaspora in Canada to young entrepreneurs at Haiti Tec, a technical and vocational training school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Working with GRAHN-Monde, a Haitian diaspora think tank, the project will set up an online directory of funding sources that the youth of Haiti Tec can tap into. The directory could eventually become a resource for all young entrepreneurs in Haiti.

“In conceiving this project, I was greatly inspired by the work of the Peace Dividend Trust, which charted out all Haitian businesses still running after the earthquake,” says Goubanova.

Youth for Good Governance in Sierra Leone

Luis Esquivel wants to see youth empowered to demand good governance. He says it’s extremely relevant at a time when young populations in the Middle East and North Africa have called on their governments to become more accountable.

His and Utpal Misra’s project  will support the Youth Alliance for Peace and Development, a network of youth groups which lobbies for governmental accountability and transparency in Sierra Leone.

The project will train a group of trainers on how to use information to enhance accountability at the local level, and build the capacity of youth groups to engage in transparency reforms processes at the national level. A text-message helpline will provide support for youth groups engaged in social accountability work.

“It will be interesting to see how a low-investment activity such as this can yield results that could be mainstreamed and brought to scale,” says Esquivel.

About the Youth Innovation Fund

The Youth Innovation Fund provides World Bank staff under the age of 33 an opportunity to pilot development ideas. The fund started in 2005 as an initiative of the World Bank’s Youth to Youth Community, a volunteer organization of young Bank staff passionate about youth empowerment.

Photo: Charlotte Kesl / World Bank