One Young World: A world where youthful ideas and innovations bloom

One of the many inspirational sayings that echoed in the Manchester Central Convention Centre this September at One Young World was the famous quote by Nelson Mandela “It always seems impossible until it’s done”. Indeed, this is the line that keeps our spirit high and motivates us to attempt, undertake and keep up until it’s done, even for seemingly impossible tasks.

To continue my previous blog on my experience at One Young World, here I have come up with a complete one. I proudly participated in the One Young World 2022 Summit in Manchester from 5-8 September. I am very pleased to have gotten this opportunity to represent IAPB and be part of Santen’s delegation at the summit.

One Young World is a global community for young leaders. This platform develops young leaders who are taking action to solve the world’s biggest challenges. This year in Manchester, over 2000 young leaders participated from 190+ countries. These young leaders are counselled by influential political, business, and humanitarian leaders like Mary Robinson, Paul Polman, Meghan Markle and many others to harness the knowledge and skills for being impactful change makers.

The four-day long summit included speeches, panel discussions, networking sessions and workshops. The initiatives of young leaders towards solving many challenges around us included actions to tackle climate change, gender inequality, access to digitalization and technology, diversity and inclusion, health issues, good governance, education, disability and so on. OYW is also a wonderful networking platform for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs where they can connect and collaborate with each other and find an opportunity to be featured and funded. The event was a fantastic forum to inspire oneself from the stories of how the young leaders emerged from failure, struggle, and success.

Among the many innovative ideas, I was impressed by the innovation of Trestle Labs. Bonny and Akshita co-founded an AI based assistive device for blind and visually impaired. The device enables a poorly sighted person to access any kind of printed, digital, or handwritten content in over 5 dozen global languages. This innovation has been a treasure for people of all ages with blindness and visual impairment to access any kind of reading material. Their effort in helping people to reach their full potential despite their visual disability is applaudable and so is its impact on achieving the SDG 2030 targets. Trestle lab also won the Lead2030 SDG challenge at OYW.

One Young World is a call for a world where every innovation would create a real social impact and where every business would respect social, environmental, and economic change beyond the profits so that everyone could find a purpose to engage and work. I would say, OYW is the forum that welcomes those young minds with creative ideas on having social impact to be embedded within any business.