Global Social Impact Fellowship program is designed for those undergraduate and graduate students from any program of Lehigh University who wish to work on sustainable development challenges in low-income countries. During this project students are engaged in faculty-guided fieldwork with diverse local partners in summer. The courses, workshops, retreats, and immersive experiences of this program integrate experiential learning, research, and entrepreneurial engagement with students leading original and ambitious projects with in-country partners in diverse countries.
This cohort of students was working on their projects for the whole academic year and finally they have reached a milestone in their projects. These interim results were presented publicly by every team on May 20 in front of the top-management, faculty, and students of AlmaU.
Initially, partnership between AlmaU and Lehigh started with 2 students' sustainable development projects: Save Tuba and Air Quality. Now, students from both institutions run 4 mutual projects (full description is
available here).
These projects are aimed at developing skillsets, mindsets, and portfolios to solve complex societal challenges. Students learn how to create real viable projects, search for funding and investments, collaborate with people of other cultures and backgrounds, how to manage a team working in different time-zones, publish their works in peer-reviewed journals, integrate their insights into national policies, and champion social movements that influence the lives of millions of people. The quest for sustainable impact drives the philosophy, pedagogy, and operations of this program with the objective of preparing students to lead lives of impact. Teams also held focus groups in schools with schoolteachers, meetings with local NGOs and experts on their themes.