Zhang Yu

JeniZhang13@163.com

SHARING the same vision for ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all, more than 200 talents from some 40 countries have gathered at UNLEASH 2019 in Shenzhen to come up with solutions to achieve this sustainable development goal (SDG).

The talents, working together to create innovative solutions for this specific SDG, will pitch their solutions to peers, experts and investors before the best solutions are selected to proceed to the Dragon’s Den, which is scheduled for Tuesday.

Vivek Kumar, cofounder of a nonprofit organization called Kshamtalaya Foundation in India, has been selected as a talent to work on quality education at Shenzhen Polytechnic, which is one of the nine sub-venues for this year’s UNLEASH Innovation Lab.

Kumar believes that quality education is the most critical among all the 17 SDGs.

“Education is the most fundamental means or tool that we can use to get the whole world out of poverty. We all have been beneficiaries of good quality education, and if you look at all the other SDGs, quality education seems to be most critical if we want to leverage other opportunities around the world,” Kumar said.

Kumar’s perspective is echoed by Adrián Bravo, a Costa Rican graphic designer who thinks education is one of the main pillars of life and that access to quality education should be at the top of the government’s agenda.

Bravo and his teammates are on a sub-team focused on vocational education. “We want to gain more attention for craftsmanship, because it is actually more sustainable,” he said.

At Shenzhen Institute of Information Technology, another sub-venue for exploring the topic of quality education, talents have also been drawing upon the collective wisdom of their team to meet the SDG.

“One of my greatest intentions for working on the SDG is to bring accessible and quality education to more people,” said Angela Chen, cofounder of Eskwelabs, an education platform for empowering young people in Southeast Asia with in-demand tech skills.

According to Chen, only 25 percent of young people in Southeast Asia graduate from university, which she thinks is a big barrier in terms of getting well-paid jobs.

Eskwelabs is one of the pre-acceleration programs of UNLEASH+, which is a new track piloted at UNLEASH 2019 and is specifically designed for alumni to come back to UNLEASH to further develop the solution they are actively working on.

“We’re fairly lucky to have been able to spend a lot of time in the early days working on the product and get to a point where we now have something that is working. We are looking to bring that to millions of people,” Chen said.