Jiri Bartušek
Czech Republic
Joinera
Jiri Bartušek
Czech Republic
Joinera
Jiří is an IT specialist focused on computer networking, cybersecurity and management with more than five years of experience in the field. He has actively participated in several cybersecurity competitions and organized various conferences for developers. He co-founded the start-up Joinera (formerly Confer-O-Matic), which creates unique 3D online virtual spaces for the masses to allow them to meet, call, socialize and educate. The start-up has amazed multiple Fortune 100 companies from all around the world and entrusted Joinera to give their employees unique and unforgettable experiences. Joinera has sold the license to sell its solution and now Jiří is continuing on with other ventures. Currently, he is Security Analyst at Livesport (Flashscore), protecting data for more than 100 million monthly users of its apps. He is also consulting for ENISA (European Agency for Cyber Security) and actively participating in the organization of ENISA's European Cyber Security Challenge. Additionally, he is consulting for the Czech Police for one of its Cyber Crimes divisions.
Hector Andrés Fuentes Curras
Venezuela
EstadoLab
Hector Andrés Fuentes Curras
Venezuela
EstadoLab
Héctor is a lawyer, human rights advocate and agent of social change in Venezuela committed to bottom-up national transformation. He is the executive director of EstadoLab, a think-and-do-tank focusing on rebuilding democratic governance in Venezuela. From 2013 to 2017, Héctor combined teaching and legal counselling. He taught the philosophy of law at the Central University of Venezuela. He defended more than 300 activists who were victims of political persecution, obtaining precautionary measures in their favour from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. After 2016 he served as legal advisor to the National Assembly, coordinating the drafting of several laws to advance political reconciliation and the reinstitutionalization of the Venezuelan State. In 2021, he became a member of the Youth Leadership Board of the Avast Foundation, an organization whose mission is to contribute to building a safe and free digital world, and was also a member of the Spark Fund Steering Committee at Global Fund for Children, dedicated to fostering transformative youth leadership around the world. Hector received a law degree summa cum laude from Universidad Central de Venezuela (2013) and holds a Master's degree in Public Policy from Oxford University (2018) and a Master's degree in Global Affairs from Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University (2020). He has been a Chevening Scholar and Schwarzman Scholar.
Jimcale A Faarah
Somalia
Plastic Venture
Jimcale A Faarah
Somalia
Plastic Venture
At age of 21, Jimcale A Faarah founded Plastic Venture - a recycling start-up that focuses on creating innovative solutions to reduce plastic waste and promote a circular economy. Over the past years, his start-up recycled over 2 million kilograms of plastic waste that would otherwise end up polluting the planet. As the founder, Jimcale led Plastic Venture to significant achievement such as awards and grants from Resolution Project, Millennium Fellowship, ALU Circular Economy, Mastercard Foundation, We Are Family Foundation, and Pollination Project grants. These awards and grants came with a total grant of $17,0000 which enabled Plastic Venture to expand to other regions in Somaliland. Through Jimcale’s leadership, Plastic Venture has become a recognized player in the sustainable business sector, contributing to a cleaner planet and better future for generations to come. Currently, Jimcale is working towards his International Business & Trade Degree at the University of African Leadership University in Rwanda. He will continue to grow Plastic Venture and raise awareness about plastic waste in Somaliland.
David Junior Nintang
Ghana
Project ReL
David Junior Nintang
Ghana
Project ReL
David Nintang grew up in Kumasi, a cultural kaleidoscope and the heart of Ghana. He is a computer science major at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and is passionate about solving problems through technology. David believes that technology is the one tool that allows us to build local solutions and creates the opportunity to scale the solution with no geographical restrictions. David is the product developer and co-founder of Ishara, a startup seeking to boost student recycling rates by incentivizing them with digital rewards. David's project at Moonshot is called ReL. Project ReL is an online learning platform that seeks to bridge the inequality gap between deaf and hard-of-hearing students and their access to online learning resources tailored to their needs; they aim to build a repository of videos and educational content that are concise, engaging, and taught entirely in sign language. Project ReL is currently at the idea stage, with a working prototype built by a team of 4 and is seeking to record more video lessons and launch in the middle of the year at two schools for the deaf in Ghana. David is passionate about this project because of its potential impact on people’s lives. When ReL is implemented, it could impact over 20,000 deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Ghana and thousands more worldwide.
Mikey Pasciuto
USA
Scrapp
Mikey Pasciuto
USA
Scrapp
Mikey Pasciuto has a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering and Sustainability with a minor in Sustainable Energy from the University of New Hampshire. As of now, he is one of the co-founders of Scrapp, a recycling platform centered around educating consumers, brands and businesses about recycling. Scrapp is the free mobile app and tablet station that separates waste at the point of disposal. With a quick scan of a product’s barcode, Scrapp shows the user exactly how to dispose of a product’s packaging correctly - according to their local authority’s recycling rules. Through gamification and education, its mission is to make recycling simple and kickstart the circular economy, beginning with the bin. In the past, Mikey worked in manufacturing with his family for over 6 years at Custom Machine LLC and with Amphenol TCS on high-speed cable development. He has studied in both the United States and New Zealand with projects ranging from Thermal System refrigeration to advancing Chenier Plains in coastal wetlands.
Nastya Podorozhnya
Poland
Martynka
Nastya Podorozhnya
Poland
Martynka
Nastya Podorozhnya is a Ukrainian human rights activist and sex educator. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, she moved to Poland at the age of 17, where she received a degree in Education and Cultural Anthropology and studied sex education. When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine broke out, Nastya evacuated from the country together with her family and founded “Martynka” — a female-led Ukrainian grassroots organisation based in Poland. Martynka provides holistic informational, legal, and psychological support to migrants and refugees around anything from human trafficking and gender-based violence to safe accommodation, abortions or emergency contraception. Over the first year of work, Martynka helped 8 migrant women open criminal proceedings against their abusers, provided hundreds of psychological consultations, and processed over 700 requests through its Telegram chat bot. Martynka remains the only Ukrainian reproductive rights organisation in Europe.
Nasreen Sheikh
Nepal / USA
Empowerment Collective
Nasreen Sheikh
Nepal / USA
Empowerment Collective
Nasreen Sheikh is an international speaker and advocate for global human rights. Her story about how she escaped Child labor and modern day slavery has been published in Forbes, Amnesty International and Cosmopolitan magazine. She has spoken at international conferences including the Foreign Trade Association in Brussels, Google in America, Women Deliver in Canada, and her interview with international influencer and author Jay Shetty went viral with over 12.4 million views on social media. Born in an undocumented rural village in India bordering Nepal. Nasreen does not know her birthdate or exact age. She grew up believing that girls were simply commodities - not human beings - that are bought and traded as such. Risking everything to prove that freedom is an essential human right for everyone, Nasreen courageously spoke truth to power. At around the age of sixteen, she founded Local Women’s Handicrafts, a successful social enterprise empowering underserved women. She now leads a grass roots charity called Empowerment Collective with the goal of ending modern day slavery by advocating 7 Keys for global human rights.
Alec Shi
Canada
EduBeyond
Alec Shi
Canada
EduBeyond
Alec Shi is a second year student at the University of Toronto. Most of his time is spent on his start-up, EduBeyond, which is currently supplying digital classrooms and novel learning tools to school systems in Indonesia. He founded the idea back in 2020, when schools first shut down during the pandemic. EduBeyond is building an adaptive learning interface that accelerates the learning process in areas of English and technological literacy for youths in developing regions. The interface is set to be a centralized location for students to access expert-curated curricula and AI-based learning tools which can then be incorporated into any existing classroom, which makes it scaleable beyond borders and restrictions of internally hiring teachers. Currently, the project aims to halve the required hours for Southeast Asian youths to reach working proficiency in English.
Luke Smith
United Kingdom
Seaweed Culture
Luke Smith
United Kingdom
Seaweed Culture
Luke Smith is the Founder & CEO of Seaweed Culture, a climate-tech business focused on reducing methane emissions in livestock using seaweed. When said seaweed species (Asparagopsis Taxiformis) is incorporated into a ruminant livestock’s diet (cows or sheep) in amounts as tiny as 80g, it can reduce their methane emissions by up to 95% with no effects on the quality of meat or milk. As a tropical species, it cannot be cultivated in the waters around the UK and majority of the USA, and thus, land-based cultivation is the only possible way to grow this seaweed species in countries where it is not native. Luke found his passion for tackling climate change while at university. He has now been recognised as one of Lincolnshire’s 30 Under 30 for his business presence and recently did a TEDx Talk on how seaweed can help tackle climate change. Luke believes that seaweed can be the answer to helping the livestock industry meet Net Zero Targets and create climate conscious products.
Brendan Hall
USA
Independent filmmaker
Brendan Hall
USA
Independent filmmaker
Brendan Hall is a documentary filmmaker telling stories in the natural world and beyond. His projects have brought viewers on adventures that explore the frontiers of our human spirit, from following a remote medical expedition through the Amazon rainforest to scientists unearthing wooly mammoth bones in Siberia. After graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, he began his career assisting with development at the National Geographic Channel. He has since traveled the world directing award winning projects for global non-profits and brands including National Geographic, Google, Adobe and The Nature Conservancy. He has also contributed cinematography to feature-length documentaries including PBS’s Bill Nye: Science Guy and Apple TV’s Red Heaven. In his work, Brendan is committed to sharing the wonders of our planet in hopes that we may be inspired to care for it. It’s a spirit he brings to his upcoming first feature-length documentary Out There: A National Parks Story, a tapestry of personal stories captured across 10,000 miles of the U.S. national parks. In 2022, Brendan was globally announced as a crew member of the dearMoon lunar mission led by Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa. Selected from over 1 million artists and creatives around the world, he will join Maezawa and 7 other crew members on the first ever civilian flight around the moon with SpaceX as soon as 2023. While Brendan is a director, cinematographer and editor, he is also a night sky photographer, scuba diver and amateur juggler.
Ida Johansson
Sweden
Hyred
Ida Johansson
Sweden
Hyred
Ida Johansson is an entrepreneur passionate about tech, impact, and leadership. She believes bringing together different generations to have real conversations about important topics is how future-proof organizations are built. At 18, Ida dropped out of high school. At the same time, she founded her first company Hyred. Its goal is to make recruitment human, with the help of AI. By incorporating AI and automation in every step of our recruitment process, it helps ensure unbiased, quality-assured, and future-proof recruitments. Now Hyred is working with clients all over the nordics. As a self-taught software developer, Ida's expertise lies in combining technology and innovation in an open-minded and optimistic environment.
Sara Polak
Czech Republic
CCHAOS Research Lab
Sara Polak
Czech Republic
CCHAOS Research Lab
Sara Polak is an Oxford-educated archaeologist who has worked in the tech sector her entire career. She has worked in start-ups in London and LA for 7 years and after almost 10 years abroad she returned back home to the Czech Republic where she now leads a research group at FIT CTU focusing on the study of the principle of cloud civilisations and the way complex social systems function. She believes in free education for all, multidisciplinarity, and is fascinated by the historical impact of technologies on the structure of human society. The mentioned research primarily focuses on the specifics of human behavior in virtual environments. To obtain the most relevant data, Sara and her team decided to build a custom simulator that, due to its idealistic foundation and significant historical distance, would allow for a relatively unbiased approach for all participants. For this reason, the writings of the Greek philosopher Plato (427–347 BC), The Republic, were chosen, where Sara finds a very detailed description of the proposed utopian society. Sara describes herself as a British comedy junkie, technology and history obsessive. She is writing a book on memes and history.
Jennifer Almodovar Jimenez
USA
W.I.L.D.
Jennifer Almodovar Jimenez
USA
W.I.L.D.
Jennifer Almodovar Jimenez holds a Bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University with majors in Politics and International Relations and minors in Philosophy and Legal Studies. She also studied international criminal law at The Hague, and politics at the London School of Economics. At Brandeis, Jennifer fostered her passion for social justice and public service by advocating for Haitian cholera victims, conducting wrongful convictions research, and working at the Massachusetts State House, U.S. Senate, and the U.K. Parliament. After Brandeis, Jennifer worked as a Paralegal at the U.S-Mexico Border assisting migrant mothers and children apply for asylum at the largest family detention center in the United States. After working with asylum seekers, Jennifer went on to complete her Masters of Management in Global Affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, where she was a Schwarzman Scholar. Jennifer also completed a Masters of Public Policy at the University of Oxford. Jennifer currently works on product strategy at a blockchain start-up focused on building consent-first data infrastructure for Web3. She is passionate about leveraging the power of technology for positive social impact and building a more just world.
Marek Miltner
Czech Republic
Milee
Marek Miltner
Czech Republic
Milee
Marek Miltner has a Masters degree in Technology Policy and AI and he is researching AI for Sustainability in his PhD thesis. He is an experienced software engineer and Information Technology specialist with more than 8 years of experience of working in both academia and industry. Apart from his main business, he teaches and researches at the Czech Technical University and often collaborate internationally, notably with Stanford University and the University of Cambridge. His project Milee helps people understand the carbon impact of every product and service we consume. He started it to help everyone make better informed decisions that benefit the planet.
Milena Rusu
Moldova
Feminismd
Milena Rusu
Moldova
Feminismd
Milena Rusu is a feminist activist from Chisinau, Moldova. In 2020, she founded Feminismd, the first youth-led organization in Moldova dedicated to fighting for gender equality. Under her leadership, Feminismd has secured over $34,000 in funding and has partnered with esteemed organizations such as UN Women Moldova, UNICEF Moldova, the National Coalition “Life without Family Violence,” Genderdoc-M, and Global Fund for Children. It has provided training to more than 1,000 teenagers on a variety of feminist topics including gender-based violence and beauty standards. Due to her unique activist experiences, Milena was selected to serve as the Youth Ambassador in Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE), on the United Nations Youth Advisory Panel in Moldova, and as a member of the Youth Leadership Council at the Global Fund for Children. I recently graduated from Orizont Theoretical Lyceum in 2022 and plan to pursue a Sociology major at Vanderbilt University.
Andrey Lopantsev
UK
Grow Your Own
Andrey Lopantsev
UK
Grow Your Own
Andrey Lopantsev was born in Ukraine and grew up the US and UK. He is an aerospace engineer and an avid futurist. Since childhood, he has been driven to try and maximise the positive impact on the world, which drove him to impact entrepreneurship. He is particularly focused on evading the resource trap: in his day job he works as the Chief Strategy Officer for the Asteroid Mining Corporation and he moonlights on his company, Grow Your Own, developing next-gen biomass upcycling systems using fungi. By harnessing the innate power of fungi to break down organic matter we can quickly covert almost any kind of organic biomass into nutritious food. The fungal metabolism is an amazing thing but harnessing it is no easy task. Though not picky in their eating habits, fungi are very particular about where they grow. We are creating the tools and framework to enable us as a species to apply the fungal metabolism at scale, anywhere in the world.
Belinta Simiyu
Kenya
Ex- share Program
Belinta Simiyu
Kenya
Ex- share Program
Belinta Simiyu is currently a sophomore at Temple University majoring in Chemistry. She is a Rise global winner and future African Ambassador. She is running a project on mentoring and guiding youths on how to find and apply to the many opportunities available. She started this project during her gap year when she used to come across so many opportunities that she believed some of her friends were eligible for but do not apply. She realized that the lack of information on these opportunities is the main reason why the students from financially disadvantaged background are not motivated to work hard.
Titir Nelson Longok
Uganda
PovArts Foundation
Titir Nelson Longok
Uganda
PovArts Foundation
Titir Nelson Longok was born and raised in one of the poorest region in Uganda. He spent ten years living in Kaluma refugee camp as an asylum seeker. Economically challenged but academically talented, his education has been sponsored by the UNHCR, Windle International and MasterCard Foundation. He is the founder of PovArts Foundation, a non-profit organization that aims at reducing the level of poverty in rural Africa through education and employment. Over the last few months, he was invited to pitch his project to potential sponsors at the Clinton Global Initiative University at Nashville.
Kianna Leader
UK
The National Lottery Community Fund
Kianna Leader
UK
The National Lottery Community Fund
Kianna Leader is a social change maker who is passionate about providing people with the tools to advocate for and elevate themselves. She has a first-class degree in BA Hons Politics, Philosophy and Economics, specialising in social economics and British Party Politics, and she uses this knowledge to initiate social change. Currently, Kianna holds the role of Youth Voice Officer at The National Lottery Community Fund. She works with youth voice teams based in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland to make philanthropy more equitable and accountable. Kianna also has a passion project Black Girl Magic, which is a voice and influence group which feeds into the UN initiative to make Leeds the first women-friendly city in the UK.
Justin Kong
USA
Dalberg
Justin Kong
USA
Dalberg
Justin Kong is a management consultant and international development specialist from the United States. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, he works for Dalberg Advisors, a strategic advisory firm focused on international development and social impact projects. He has worked on a range of projects related to finance, urban planning, internet access, and health. Most recently, Justin consulted the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) and Mawingu Networks on expanding rural internet access in Kenya and other East African countries. He also engaged Gates Ventures to assess the drivers of return on investment of community health programs on the African continent. Prior to Dalberg in 2017-2019, Justin worked at Population Services International, where he supported a Gates-funded regional malaria elimination program with a network of 21,000+ private sector health providers and community health workers across Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Here he focused on human-centred design research, program management, and data analysis. From 2015-2017, Justin also worked at a healthcare consulting firm in the United States to analyze hospital finances, health insurance contracts, and patient medical records to forecast risk and optimize revenue. He holds a Master’s in Global Affairs at Tsinghua University, Schwarzman College, and a Bachelor’s in Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley.
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