University students from across Ethiopia have come together to co-create solutions for youth unemployment at an interactive bootcamp organized in Addis Abeba by UNDP and Iceaddis, an innovation hub and tech incubator.

The boot camp was organized as part of UNDP’s global Accelerator Lab initiative - a new radical innovative approach that aims to solve 21^st century dynamic and complex development challenges. At the bootcamp, students were able to gain new experiences in understanding, analyzing and defining the problem of youth unemployment from their perspective. They were able to generate creative ideas and come up with possible solutions. They also developed hand-on experience in sketching, developing prototype and a video demo for the solutions they proposed. 

The Ethiopia Accelerator Lab also known as ‘Goh Lab’ (Goh means dawn in Amharic) was launched on 10^th December 2019 with the purpose of exploring, mapping and testing new opportunities for solving local development challenges in Ethiopia, including youth unemployment. Organizing the boot camp was the first step towards involving the main stakeholders, the youth, to solve problems relating with them.

Goh lab will further develop and expand on the top 5 solutions selected from the boot camp. The next course of action will be identifying stakeholders and innovators working on similar solutions and platforms before moving towards experimentation and testing. Once the solutions are tested and proved, the lab will help shar the new knowledge locally and within the global Accelerator Lab network.

The State of Qatar and the Federal Republic of Germany are the two top partners working with UNDP on this initiative