Youth Co: Lab

Towards a Solution

Youth Co: Lab is a socially-oriented enterprise which empowers young people across Asia and the Pacific to create:

• New sustainable solutions to social problems
• Employment and social development
• Elevating social and political engagement

The objective of Youth Co: Lab is to develop a popular platform for nations in Asia-Pacific to empower and participate in young people to speed things through management, social innovation and entrepreneurship in implementing sustainable development goals. In order to meet the most urgent problems in the region, Youth Co: Lab intends to put youthful individuals on an equal footing, by equipping them with the abilities of the 21st century, and by catalyzing and supporting new youthful start-ups and social enterprises in the whole region. In relation to promoting entrepreneurship for young people.

Youth Co: Lab organizes multi-faceted events, which encompass training sessions on entrepreneurship skills, social innovation competitions and government-to-community dialogues about the structural bottlenecks faced by young entrepreneurs. Youth Co: Lab projects framework is versatile because it can be applied to address different social, economic and environmental issues. Youth Co: Lab National Dialogues are usually centered on issues of local relevance, focusing on one or more SDG-related theme in each country or territory. Youth Co: Lab have grouped the cycle of National Dialogues into four main themes: Environment and Sustainability, Gender Equality and Social Inclusion, Innovation and Digital Technology, and Peace and Democracy.

Each National Dialogue invites young entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas to a panel of government, private sector and youth programming officials which culminate in the selection of key winners who have the most innovative and competent social entrepreneurship ideas. The winning teams are then invited to participate in the annual Regional Summit of Youth Co: Lab.

Since the start of the project Youth Co: Lab has:

• had over 48,000 attendees;
• benefited over 2,500 young social entrepreneurs;
• helped create or improve almost 500 social enterprises;
• worked in 20 countries and territories in the region;
• partnered with over 100 organizations, institutions and private sector companies;
• developed 2 research publications about youth, entrepreneurship and skills in the region;
• built an online community of over 62,000 followers, with over 100 million impressions under the #youthcolab hashtag.

The presence of youths in Youth Co: Labs’ events, facilitates learning and sharing of experiences and linkages with other youth networks, government, private sector and academia are creating pathways for replication and ensuring sustainability.