The past year has been a tumultuous time for youths and businesses alike. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities and posed unprecedented challenges to our world, forcing youths, organizations, and countries to rethink how we can build resilience through sustainability. Across Southeast Asia, sustainability has gained traction amongst the region’s governments, businesses, investors and citizens. The issue is a pressing one — Southeast Asia’s rapid economic growth has come hand in hand with a multitude of issues including environmental degradation, depletion of natural resources, and loss of biodiversity.
Thus, the theme of LEAPS 2021 Youth Challenge is
‘Sustainability: Advancing ASEAN’s Green Economy’
We have narrowed our focus down to three sub-themes:
Food Security
Liveable Cities
Impact Investing
The LEAPS Youth Challenge aims to help tertiary students sharpen their business acumen and knowledge of ASEAN markets while enabling companies to gain different perspectives from youths in building business resiliency through sustainable strategies. Over the past three months, more than ten youth teams have worked intensively with mentors in businesses across different industries. The youth teams have provided innovative solutions to businesses and worked together to better the businesses’ regional market strategy.
The youth challenge is organized by ASEAN Business Youth Association (ABYA) in partnership with the National Youth Council, SWITCH, *SCAPE Singapore, and sponsored by Young Southeast Asian Leaders.
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About Us
About SWITCH
The Singapore Week of Innovation & TeCHnology (SWITCH) is a platform where scientific discoveries and advancements are transformed into disruptive technology applications that will redefine the way we live. It focuses on deep tech applications in the areas of manufacturing, urban solutions, health and biomedical sciences and digital services.
SWITCH is where companies identify new technologies for business transformation and where collaborations are formed. It convenes entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, innovator and industry professionals from diverse backgrounds.
About ABYA LEAPS 2021
Leadership, Exploration and Progress (LEAPS ) is the flagship program of ASEAN Business Youth Association (ABYA). LEAPS seeks to expand learning offerings, scale the outreach to youths across ASEAN and build a sustainable train-the-trainers model in 2021 and beyond. ASEAN Business Youth Association seeks to groom next generation ASEAN-ready talent to participate in the massive opportunity in ASEAN through LEAPS, a remote tertiary student program to sharpen their technical & soft skills that would be relevant. LEAPS successfully piloted in Summer 2020 with 15 Singapore-based youths making recommendations to projects sponsored by companies going regional.
About abya
We are a youth organization that aims to help youths navigate ASEAN and explore its endless opportunities. ABYA was one of the 3 winning teams of the Youth Action Challenge in 2020 and is powered by Young NTUC and the National Youth Council. Our vision is to be a leading youth organization that nurtures future ASEAN business leaders and our mission is to empower a community of ASEAN youths to work and communicate effectively with people regionally, through cross-cultural training, exposure, application and networking.
