Youth unemployment is the challenge proposed by Hult Prize 2018, the most important youth competition in the world.

November 27, 2018

The third edition of Hult Prize will be held On November 30, 2018. The competition is the world’s largest social approach to youth, organized by the Hult Prize Foundation of the International School of Business Hult and driven by the foundation of former US President Bill Clinton. This year, Marlon Gancino will be coordinating the event. Gancino is a ninth-semester student in the School of Biological Sciences and Engineering. The campus director obtained the highest student response to date and conducted six activities to ensure that each team is prepared for the internal and regional program competition.

The first event that the Hult Prize Yachay Tech 2018 team organized was the screening of the live broadcast of the international final of the Hult Prize challenge 2017. The objective of this event was to give a clearer idea of the program and show the challenge for this year: youth unemployment. Once the event was over, the Hult Prize Yachay Tech 2018 team started a campaign to attract teams to the competition. The team director organized small spaces of around fifteen minutes during class hours to explain to his classmates the nature of the competition, held personalized meetings to open doors to teams who had doubts.

After presenting the program, the team organized workshops to prepare their teams to develop the key points for the competition: a solid project and a well-planned exhibition. In this sense, Marlon organized 5 preparation workshops with the support of the Yachay EP incubator team. The first was a design thinking workshop so teams could start putting their ideas together, shaping them and validating them. This workshop allowed the teams to ensure that the design of each project is well targeted to the benefit of the youth population, as the challenge indicates. The second was a project landing workshop, which helped the teams to turn their idea into a project. The specific audience for this workshop was the youth community. The third was a business model workshop so that the operation is autonomously sustainable. The fourth was a workshop for pitch creation, the speech with which each team will present their project to the judges. The last workshop was on the modality of the contest, the criteria for project qualification and the logistics of the event.

Through these events, the Hult Prize 2018 team was able to register 29 teams, with 101 participants, which represents 10% of the students of the University. This is the highest incidence of registrations that the event has had at Yachay Tech. The teams will seek to solve this year’s challenge, focused on creating large-scale opportunities to provide meaningful employment to unemployed youth.