As an international UN Youth Volunteer fully funded by the Czech Republic, Tereza dedicated most of her time at MiLab to designing technology-based solutions to address development challenges in the country. Her work involved projects such as digital education for Moldovan children, using behavioral science to reduce plastic and energy consumption, utilizing Big Data for urban development, and introducing blockchain-based solar power solutions for public institutions.

The initiatives awarded under the Youth Volunteering Innovation Challenge featured youth engaging volunteers to address social issues with the help of private sector volunteering – the SAP staff members who provided mentorships were also volunteers.  The three-month mentorships enabled grantees to scale up their projects in the areas of environment, people with disabilities, and women’s economic empowerment within urban contexts, with a focus on leveraging volunteering for the localization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Prishtina, Kosovo: Building on our achievements with the foresight exercise for unemployment in Kosovo, our innovations team at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which I am part of, is now moving on to the Big Data realm. Every day, people around the world are generating massive amounts of data that, when aggregated and depersonalized to protect the privacy of each one of us, can be used to get insights into the state of society and enable us to respond more effectively and efficiently to its needs.