From 14-20 November, Global Entrepreneurship Week is taking place across 160 countries around the world. The annual campaign celebrates self-starters and entrepreneurs, and engages millions of people in pursuing their own businesses.
Several entrepreneurs in the One Young World Ambassador community have not only established profitable, innovative businesses, but have paved the way in social entrepreneurship, developing solutions to social, cultural and environmental issues.
These One Young World Ambassadors are making significant strides in impacting the local and global communities.
Fred Blackford, 30, UK
Fred co-founded the imaging app, Polaroid Swing, a rival to the likes of Instagram. Swing combines photo and video to create an engaging, animated photo-viewing experience. The app has the backing of Twitter co-Founder, Biz Stone as well as the designer of Instagram’s early filters and its logo. They have garnered investment from the firm which owns the iconic Polaroid brand.
Diana Paredes, 33, Peru
Diana is the CEO and Co-Founder of Suade, a benchmark software platform that enables financial institutions to understand and deliver their regulatory requirements. She left her career in investment banking to launch her own fintech enterprise which has been named on the "FinTech 50" list of companies to watch. The Bank of England has hailed Suade as a solution to the complexities of regulation.
Vibin Joseph, 31, India
Vibin is the founder and Executive Director of BiOZEEN, a bio-process engineering company that is responsible for immunising 1-in-3 children worldwide with its manufactured vaccines. As 6.6 million children die every year from diseases which can be prevented by vaccines, BiOZEEN seeks to reach every child it can.
Victoria Alonsoperez, 28, Uruguay
Victoria founded IEETech, a social enterprise which developed Chipsafer, a startup that tracks and early detects anomalies in cattle health, remotely and autonomously. She has received several awards and accolades including the Best Young Inventor Award from the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2013, the Most Innovative Startup of Latin America and the Caribbean in 2014 by the Inter-American Development Bank, and Innovator of the Year - Argentina & Uruguay by MIT Technology Review, and Top 100 Women in the Vital Voices Global Leadership Network in 2016. Last year, Chipsafer received the second prize in the Chivas Regal Global Competition, ‘The Venture.’
Bonnie Chiu, 23, Hong Kong
Bonnie co-founded Lensational, a non-profit social enterprise which aims to empower marginalised women by equipping them with cameras and photography training. Since launching in 2013, the organisation – which has expanded to a team of 50 volunteers – has taught photography to 400 women across 12 developing countries. Bonnie was a 2015 Hivos Social Innovation Award recipient and received the 2016 Asian Women of Achievement Awards - Young Achiever.
Jeremy Lamri, 32, France
Jeremy is a founder of Monkey Tie, the first job board focusing on the candidate’s personality and the employer’s corporate culture, & Le Lab RH, an association of 150+ innovative startups in HR field. Monkey Tie has supported over 100,000 young people for the job market. Monkey Tie was ranked N°2 in the most attractive startups in 2015.
Enass Abo-Hamed, 30, Palestine
Enass is the founder & CEO of H2GO Power, a clean-tech company that provides safe methods of hydrogen production and storage to generate power on the move. She is currently a Research Associate at University of Cambridge where she works on H2GO. She was a finalist in the 2015 Cartier Women's Initiative Awards. She won Best Energy Startup award in the world at the 2016 HT Summit.
Rainier Mallol, 25, Dominican Republic
Rainier co-founded AIME, a software which uses epidemiology, public health best practices and artificial intelligence to predict deadly outbreaks, aiding world governments in tackling diseases even before they happen. AIME was listed as a finalist in Forbes’ Top 40 for World Changers in 2015 and won the PitchGov Sao Paulo competition in the health category.
Kevin Smiley, 27, Canada
Kevin is the founder, President & CEO of SuraiTea Inc., a tea packaging business which hires recently arrived Syrian refugees. His objective is to, through the sale of premium teas, create high-value jobs for refugees and create a sustainable source of corporate donations from SuraiTea Inc to the not-for-profits active in the refugees resettling effort. SuraiTea recently won the 2016 Ottawa Social Impact Award.
Sabine Sipunova, 24, Latvia
Sabine is the co-Founder and COO of Sorry As A Service, a software company that helps companies to say sorry and wow their customers through their mailbox. Named Top 10 Promising Founders To Watch In The Baltics by Forbes. Sabine went through two accelerator programs including Techstars London in 2015 and the Start Up Wise Guys BusinessTech'15 CEED Tech program.
Babur Jahid, 21, Afghanistan
Babur founded You See Clear, a social-enterprise with the goal of impacting lives through the provision of affordable glasses. After fleeing Afghanistan with his family at an early age, he is now settled in Canada where he is currently attending Carleton University. Babur participated in Carleton’s social innovation hub which led him to One Young World where he won the Resolution Project’s Social Venture Challenge. He will officially launch in Afghanistan by next summer.
