UPSHIFT: empowering a generation of change-makers
From Indonesia to Vietnam, when young people have the space, time, and support, they turn to creative solutions to solve local challenges, most often tackling environmental and social problems in their communities.
UPSHIFT started in 2014 and focused on generating skills and jobs for young people facing high unemployment rates, especially those who were marginalized due to various intersectional factors such as disability, gender, ethnicity, economic marginalization, and their age. Seven years later, the UPSHIFT wave has lifted more than 1.3 million adolescents and young people across 35 countries — including Vietnam, Myanmar, and Indonesia — in which UNICEF has so far scaled the initiative.
In the program, young people have thought, done, failed, and tried again. Many have succeeded. In Vietnam, young people with disabilities have diagnosed and designed solutions for making their city more navigable, and put together services for employment preparation and job placement for fellow young people with disabilities. Others are experimenting with carbon-fighting algae to combat the carbon emissions from prevalent and polluting motorbikes, which are estimated to number 7.3 million in Ho Chi Minh City alone. These are ideas that have all made the journey from idea to reality, turning young people into social entrepreneurs who are changing the trajectory of their community one idea at a time.
The UPSHIFT approach is intentionally designed to tackle multiple aspects of what many young people experience as an entrenched and exclusionary innovation ecosystem. It makes use of the three elements of an inclusive innovation framework — the what, where, and how. UPSHIFT intentionally invests in and targets the participation of traditionally excluded and marginalized young people to acquire social innovation and entrepreneurship skills, to boost their confidence and competence to design solutions that solve social, economic, environmental, and climate-change-related vulnerabilities.
By seeking and incubating socially innovative ideas with adolescents and youth, young people act upon issues they care about and that have impact on their lives.
They are not alone. Each UPSHIFT program integrates itself into the local ecosystem. In Vietnam, this includes the relevant Ministries of Labour and Social Affairs (MOLISA) and Education (MOE), city governments such as the Ho Chi Minh City’s Department of Science and Technology, national organizations like the Youth Union, key innovation ecosystem stakeholders such as the Saigon Innovation Hub, and mentors and volunteers ranging from NGOs to private sector partners. Together with young people, it is this solidarity of stakeholders that has realized the vision of integrating UPSHIFT as an extracurricular activity in high schools and in the context of technical and vocational education and training across the country including in the most remote schools in the mountainous provinces of Dien Bien and Lao Cai, which have a strong concentration of ethnic groups facing regular language barriers to access quality educational content. The ambition in Vietnam is to reach ten million adolescents and young people by 2026.
This story about UPSHIFT was contributed by Tanya Accone, based at UNICEF in New York.
This story is featured in “Inclusive Innovation”, published first by Routledge Press and coauthored by Robyn Klingler-Vidra (Senior Lecturer, King’s College London), Alex Glennie (Principal Researcher, Nesta), and Courtney Savie Lawrence (Climate and Systems Innovation Consultant, Cofounder Circular Design Lab).
Why this, why now? Innovation offers potential: to cure diseases, to better connect people, and to make the way we live and work more efficient and enjoyable. At the same time, innovation can fuel inequality, decimate livelihoods, and harm mental health. This book contends that inclusive innovation — innovation motivated by environmental and social aims — is able to uplift the benefits of innovation while reducing its harms.
For us, the term “inclusive innovation” describes the pursuit of innovation that has social (and environmental) aims, and local context, at its heart. As we strive to bridge the gaps in practice, we are focused on also recalibrating a mismatch in language and lexicon. We believe that in some cases, those who are doing inclusive innovation are not adequately acknowledged, and so policy is not designed as effectively as it could be, and more generally, the ecosystem is not as collaborative, or inclusive, as it has the potential to be.
Want to download the complementary ‘Authors’ Copy’ and join the LinkedIn Community of Practice? More at inclusiveinnovation.io
