UNLEASH 2019: Two ways Nobel Peace Prize Laureates challenged emerging social entrepreneurs.
About a week ago, I was in Shenzhen, China at the UNLEASH 2019 closing ceremony. While my "battery" should've been running low on energy due to a crazy mix of jet-lag and an intense facilitator schedule, I couldn't have been more energized. Witnessing all the potential impact more than 200 solutions created by 1000+ diverse talents focused on addressing the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will do that for you!
As part of the final event, we had the honour of listening to inspiring keynotes and panels with Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Leymah Gbowee and Muhammad Yunus, whose impact on the world is undeniable. They celebrated the insights, ideas and effort of the event's amazing talents, but in addition to this validation, each issued a provocative challenge to the practitioners, facilitators and business leaders that are taking these ideas beyond UNLEASH, and I've been reflecting on these comments since then. Here's what each of them had to say:
"SDGs are not only for Africa or Asia. They are for all of us."
Ms. Gbowee, a peace activist who led the nonviolent women's movement that helped end the Second Liberian War, challenged the audience to look beyond the obvious when designing solutions for a better world. "SDGs are not only for Africa or Asia. They are for all of us", she said in response to the amount of concepts centred around these areas. While it's necessary to solve pressing issues in these parts of the world, her comment holds a lot of weight: countries further along the development curve have much higher carbon footprints, and deal with their own gnarly version of social issues and challenges, including mental health, gender equality and more. There's clearly an opportunity to leverage the diverse teams that UNLEASH creates to take another stab at solving these problems.
"Not everything needs to scale"
Dr. Yunus' challenge came in the form a simple statement: "Not everything needs to scale". The Bangladeshi social entrepreneur who pioneered the concept of micro-credits in the form of the Grameen Bank said that before thinking about scaling, you need to think about real local impact, and that its fine if some concepts work only for a bespoke community. This comment is particularly interesting as it goes counter to what many of the business-oriented judges prioritized at UNLEASH's Dragon Den, with the ability to scale a concept being a key evaluation criteria. While there's undeniable value in scalability, and in a perfect world, a good idea is completely scalable, there's also merit in context-sensitive solutions that are solely focused on improving a specific community.
Hopefully, these provocations set by Ms. Gbowee and Dr. Yunus are something the 2020 cohort keeps in mind as they take on new challenges next year. I'm still riding a high from my amazing UNLEASH experience; I will not soon forget the amazing talents I worked with, my wonderful fellow facilitators, the experts I met, or the lessons I learned from all of them. Looking forward to next year!
UNLEASH is a global innovation lab, which gathers 1,000 talents annually to collaborate on solutions to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. You can learn about it at unleash.org.