A National Youth Social Enterprise Challenge Competition 2011 was organised by the YES Network-Pakistan in collaboration with British Council, which selected 10 teams of young people to participate in the competition.
The Youth Social Enterprise Challenge Award is at its fourth run and is open to all young people studying in technical institutions across Pakistan. Speaking on occasion, Ali Raza Khan, YES Network Pakistan chief executive officer, said, “Youth Social Entrepreneurship programme was launched to transform youth from victims to leaders and from citizens-in-waiting to citizens-in-action. Youth social entrepreneurship should be seen as a development tool which can enable us to meet our social service obligations and achieve our development goals by drawing on the skills, energy and resources of young people.”
The Youth Social Enterprise Award was implemented in two phases. During the first phase, social acceptability of the programme was created by conducting a series of sensitisation sessions with the representatives of over 1,400 technical colleges on the concept of youth social entrepreneurship. During the second phase, several orientation sessions were held to create awareness of the concept of youth social entrepreneurship and to nurture and grow innovation and entrepreneurial culture amongst students of technical colleges.
Over 20,000 students of public and private technical colleges are given orientation on social entrepreneurship and the process of getting involved in the competition. Over 1,000 ideas were received from young people studying in technical colleges of Pakistan. As many as 10 young teams in the ages of 16 to 21 years were selected to participate in the National Challenge to compete with each other. Before the competition, one-day social entrepreneurship training was held with the teams to give tips and guidelines for effective participation in the competition. The competition started at 9am and ended at 5pm. During the competition, all the ten teams were given a problem and asked to come up with a unique and innovative idea to improve the situation within a given fixed budget.
By the end of the day, teams were asked to submit their ideas for judgment through the completion of three documents such as their innovative ideas, competitors’ outlines, money matters and a 90-second presentation. All the entries of the competition will be judged by a panel of judges belonging to education and social sector.
