Girls Who Innovate: Middle School Girls Solving Canada's Challenges

Girls Who Innovate: STEM Program for Middle School Girls

This summer, Imran Allarakhia co-founder of BioEndeavor hosted a 4 week virtual series called Girls Who Innovate Social Entrepreneurship Program - for girls in grades 6-8 from across Canada. Girls Who Innovate was a four-week experiential learning program designed to empower middle school girls to use science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and artificial intelligence (AI) to address real-world challenges connected to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

Throughout the program, participants explored global and community challenges through deep empathy, human-centered design, STEM innovation, and AI for Good. They worked collaboratively to identify problems they cared about, understand the needs of the people and communities affected by those problems, and develop innovative, purpose-driven solutions including through prototyping with AI.

Participants were introduced to the intersection of STEM, sustainability, social innovation, and entrepreneurship, learning how emerging technologies and creative problem-solving can be used not only to build products and businesses, but also to create meaningful social and environmental impact.

The program culminated in a Start Up pitch competition in which participants applied their learning to share their innovative solutions to a panel of judges including BioEndeavor faculty and students. The posts that follow, feature some of the wonderful businesses and products our girls designed and pitched at our Start Up competition.

We are so proud of the achievement's of our girls and our co-founder Imran Allarakhia. The program was supported by BioEndeavor through in kind donations.