Showcasing young entrepreneurs

Name: Alma Gashi Age: 16 Location: Kosovo Innovation: Alma Gashi created a product to raise awareness surrounding optical health in her community. During her project, “Let’s See” she changed the perspectives in her community about vision issues. In an interview, Alma discussed the importance of optical health and the benefits of broadening public knowledge of eye health problems. Follow up question: What is something many of us confront that isn’t widely known?

Name: Kim Van and Quang Nam Age: 18 Location: Vietnam Innovation: Both Kim Van and her brother are originally from Quang Nam and were born with Polio, limiting their movement. Due to their conditions, Van and her brother confront difficulties in getting to and from school. Despite these challenges, Van excels in academia and she dreamt of helping people in a similar situation. UPSHIFT has helped her to pursue her dreams of professionalism, communications and project planning. Follow up question: Do you have hurdles that you’ve overcome? However minor they may seem, this is a huge accomplishment and we’d love to hear from you.

Name: Miriam Matti, Girls Code Age: 12 Location: Lagos, Nigeria Innovation: Matti is building a website for nonprofits located in the tech district of Lagos. Nigeria wrestles with high dropout rates and the outreach programs that Matti designs help them to reach underserved communities. GirlsCoding trains girls between ages 10 and 17 to create and design websites and programming. Follow up question: Would building a website or learning more about design be helpful to you and your community?

Name: Janhavi Joshi and Nurpura Kirloskar Age: 25 Location: India, MIT Institute of Design, Pune Innovation: While students of industrial design at Pune’s MIT Institute of Design, they developed the prototype of a wearable product that helped hearing-impaired dancers feel music through vibrations. Later, they founded BleeTech Innovations, which now produces India’s first wearable watches for the hearing impaired to reduce the stigma of hearing aids. Follow up question: How can we lessen the stigma associated with impairments such as hearing loss? What are some other ideas?

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