Global Leadership Challenge

Ben James is a member of the team that won the Global Leadership Challenge, a joint initiative of the University of Oxford and the University of St.Gallen. With the support of the the Lemann Foundation and the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the challenge focuses on the power of purpose. How can we incorporate it into our actions, careers and decisions? Ben, Arrey and their team mates Ruby-Anne Birin from South Africa, and Duong Vu from Vietnam were among the 100 promising young people from 30 countries that were selected for the GLC, a week-long hybrid conference with 20 senior leaders, coming together to find solutions following four UN sustainable developement goals (health and well-being, quality education, climate action and gender equality). 

Ben and Arrey’s group was the one among 20 groups that won the challenge and was therefore awarded the GLC prize in St.Gallen during the Symposium. “With our group, we were able to have an intimate kind of team perspective,” said James. “We wouldn’t have won without that, for sure”. His team member Arrey says: “GLC over delivered for me and brought me much more than I anticipated in leadership growth”

The program focuses on leadership and purpose: “it was such a direct tackling of what it means to be a leader that I hadn’t encountered anywhere else. So that was fantastic” says Ben. Arrey adds: “Leading a growing community as ours comes with challenges of managing people of different cultures, conflicts and doing all these on strong personal values and skills. As a young person building the future, sharing not just to my community but to thousands online, my goal in joining the global leadership challenge was to responsibly explore my influence as a leader to serve & plan more action projects and that’s exactly what I gained from it.”

James, whose background is in software engineering, is also the founder of the Cambridge Climate Society. “When I started …I felt the power of joining a community. Before that, I had never been exposed to such an energetic and pragmatic group of people,” he says. “For me, that was when I realized I could really help people and make a difference.” 

Bate instead is a young African internet entrepreneur and journalist, that also connected to a flourishing community: “In 2019, as an extension of my journalism and entrepreneurial work, I started a community of entrepreneurs in Africa. Fast forward to today, our community has over 20,000+ entrepreneurs on the email list. Once a year we host a grand gathering of 600+ entrepreneurs with mentorship events within the year.”. The power of connecting professionals, students, and entrepreneurs has been the spark in both Ben and Arrey’s lives, allowing them to come together and tackle possible solutions to climate change. 

Arrey says: “As we were asked to try and co-create an action project that contributes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, our 4-man team created a project called GALE (Global Access for Learning about the Environment)”. He further explains: “GALE utilizes a WhatsApp bot to make Climate Education accessible to those most affected by it. It came from the observation that the most adverse effects of climate change have fallen on those who are least educated about it. So with GALE, we aimed to meet the needs of local communities and empower them with the knowledge to engage, explore and develop their own solutions to local problems.” 

The challenge presented them with some surprises. “I thought at the beginning that we would work in climate, but we were actually put in education,” Ben says. “That forced us to be more diverse in our thought process – for example, our solution ended up being a climate education solution.” Speaking challenges, Arrey says: “They were such an opportunity to bond with other leaders from diverse backgrounds, listen to their stories and see in real-time what other challenges they were facing. That to me was a blessing as I found myself constantly reflecting on those conversations each time I faced a similar challenge”.

Thinking broadly, and expanding the realm of solutions, could be the key factor when tackling climate change. For example, James suggests the importance of financial disclosure: “Once we have better data on what climate risks our portfolios hold, and where our capital is allocated, and what emissions that’s funding, that enables us to have a much clearer picture of how we can redirect capital more efficiently.”