In Kassala State, Sudan, 160 young innovators—66 of them refugees—stood before judges and peers to pitch their ideas for turning hardship into opportunity. The i-UPSHIFT Summit, convened by the International Labour Organization, was not a charity showcase but a marketplace of possibilities: 38 youth-led startups, born from a partnership between the ILO, Sudan's Ministry of Youth and Sports, and local training organizations, presented solutions to the real problems their communities face.
The significance of this moment reaches beyond the pitches themselves. Sudan has long hosted one of the world's largest refugee populations, and displacement routinely robs young people of the skills, networks, and capital needed to build livelihoods. The i-UPSHIFT programme flips that narrative by treating refugee youth and young people from host communities not as a burden on local economies but as sources of innovation and growth. Over 500 young women and men from Shagarab Refugee Camp and surrounding areas in Kassala and Wad Al Hilew went through structured bootcamps and mentorship, learning entrepreneurship, social innovation, and employability skills adapted from UNICEF's UPSHIFT methodology and strengthened by ILO expertise.
The 38 winning teams address gaps that no distant aid program could easily identify: livelihoods, essential services, and community resilience—the unglamorous backbone of human dignity. These aren't tech startups in the Silicon Valley sense. They're young people designing solutions for the economies and societies they actually live in, with local knowledge as their competitive advantage. That distinction matters. Geofrey Ochola, Deputy Programme Manager for ILO PROSPECTS in Sudan, spoke to it directly: "Targeted investments in youth skills and innovation can create pathways to livelihoods, social cohesion and hope, even in challenging settings."
What makes i-UPSHIFT distinctive is that it brings refugee youth and host community youth together as collaborators, not competitors. That approach serves a second purpose alongside economic opportunity—it builds social cohesion in fragile contexts where tension between groups can threaten stability. By supporting both populations jointly, the programme strengthens local economies while reducing the isolation that displacement can deepen.
The Summit itself drew government officials, UN agencies, development partners, and civil society—a signal that these aren't peripheral experiments but central to how the region rebuilds. Sudan's government has invested heavily in this work: the country has been an ILO member since 1956 and currently sits on the ILO Governing Board. The PROSPECTS Partnership, funded by the Government of the Netherlands, supports implementation alongside UNICEF and UNHCR, with plans to expand from Kassala and White Nile State to Khartoum. The ILO is working with government institutions, employers' and workers' organizations, and development partners on employment creation, skills development, and labour market strengthening across fragile and crisis-affected regions.
These 38 startups represent proof of concept. But they also represent something quieter and perhaps more important: young people in one of the world's most challenging humanitarian contexts being given the tools and platform to say, "We can solve this ourselves." That belief—that young people from displaced communities are agents of change, not objects of charity—is where real economic transformation begins.