Fundación La Caixa promueve 100 proyectos juveniles por un mundo más sostenible

EduCaixa's The Challenge campus brings together 370 secondary school students committed to sustainability in Barcelona. Divided into 100 teams from Spain and Portugal, the participants will develop 100 innovative projects to change the world, with the focus on protecting the planet.

As a result of the growing concern of young people about the climate emergency, almost half of the proposals presented at this year's campus are framed within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations related to the planet, such as: water management, climate action, and the protection of underwater life and terrestrial ecosystems. Also linked to environmental challenges, prosperity-related projects abound such as: responsible production and consumption, sustainable cities and communities, and affordable and clean energy.

Among the ideas that will be developed during the four days of the campus are systems to reduce domestic water consumption, an app to measure the ecological footprint, an ecological boat that collects plastic waste, drones to detect forest fires and tools to reduce clothing consumption, among others.

The other participating teams presented projects related to other major future challenges linked to the SDGs, such as human well-being and peace. For example, methods to improve learning through artificial intelligence and GPT chat technology, tools to combat loneliness among the elderly and solidarity initiatives for victims of the war in Ukraine.

"We want to encourage the involvement and commitment of young people to the future challenges of their generation. That is why we are promoting their talent and their most innovative ideas through The Challenge. This campus is an opportunity for them to train key 21st century skills and encourages them to seek solutions to bring about positive change in the world," said Xavier Bertolín, Corporate Director of the Education and Marketing Area of the "la Caixa" Foundation.

The 100 teams have been selected from among 1,546 candidates registered for The Challenge and are made up of students in the 3rd and 4th years of ESO, Baccalaureate and FPGM. In total, 370 students and 100 teachers from 77 schools in Spain and Portugal, half of them public schools, are taking part.

Catalonia, with 29 teams, is the region with the most teams, followed by the Community of Madrid (16), Andalusia (15) and the Community of Valencia (12). Four teams have been selected in Aragón, Castilla y León and Murcia; three teams in Cantabria, the Basque Country and Portugal; two teams in Castilla La Mancha; and one team in Asturias, the Canary Islands, Galicia and Extremadura.

In addition, the winners of the EduCaixa Research-Action Prize, awarded to three teams at the Exporecerca Jove international research fair with a proposal for action and entrepreneurship with a social impact, will also take part in the campus.

During the campus, the teams will be able to develop their projects with the help of twenty educoaches, who will be in charge of the accompaniment, guidance and educational support. Through workshops, talks and experiences programmed on the campus, the students will connect with each other, train skills and share learning. Visits have been scheduled to reference centres and organisations such as the Sant Joan de Déu Maternity and Children's Hospital, Open Arms, RTVE Catalunya, NTT Data, Groots, Campus 42 Barcelona and Teamlabs.

At the end of the campus, each team will present its project to the jury, which will announce the 15 winning teams and their 75 members. The prize will be a training trip to the United States this summer. The trip includes visits to some of the most prestigious universities in New York and Boston, such as MIT, Yale and Columbia, and the presentation of the winning projects at the United Nations headquarters.

"I am very excited to welcome you all to New York this summer. I hope to see you soon and look forward to hearing about all your great innovations, because it is young people like you who are going to change the world and help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement," said Brighton Kaoma, Global Director of the UN Youth for Sustainable Development, in a message.

EducaCaixa is the educational programme of the "la Caixa" Foundation that promotes educational transformation in order to respond to the needs of 21st century society. Its main challenges are: on the one hand, to improve students' learning opportunities; and on the other, to improve the educational quality of schools to guarantee equity and equal opportunities.