UNIDO Challenge

This Global Citizenship Seminar is a collaboration with UNIDO which explores how we might harness the resources, innovation and expertise of businesses- especially multinational corporations to reimagine agrifood systems as engines of economic empowerment and resilience. This year, the challenge will focus on coffee production in Latin America and the Carribean.

Students will be guided through a design thinking workshop to identify gaps where MNCs could intervene meaningfully improve value chains, enabling access to finance, cross sector partnerships or fostering local technology adoption. This will involve interviewing international experts in the field from UNIDO, the private sector and academia.

The proposals developed through design thinking workshops should be bold, scalable ideas that bring stakeholders together across the private and public sectors, leveraging local strengths and focussing on inclusive, sustainable growth. Proposals will be presented at the UN to a jury of UNIDO experts at the UN Campus.

The challenge is: How might UNIDO, together with development partners, scale the ACT Coffee Programme (Advancing Climate-Resilience and Transformation) to Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in a way that strengthens climate resilience, improves farmer incomes, and delivers inclusive and sustainable coffee value chains?

DAY 1 – Monday, 23^rd March 2026 at UN Campus AM (Room: CR4), WU Campus (Room D5.0.002)
1.  UNIDO opens the skills seminar with a plenary session at the UN Campus (Room CR4)- including UN SDGs and how this links to what UNIDO does. The plenary also includes the challenge for students to work on, with background and context.

2.  The students will then break into groups and will be led through a design thinking workshop to generate ideas and proposals. The students will return to WU after lunch to continue the design thinking workshop until 5pm (D5.0.002).

During the week, students will continue to work on their ideas.

DAY 2 – Friday, 27^th March 2026 at WU Campus
1.In the morning, students will continue their design thinking workshop and develop their presentations (D5.0.002).

2. In the afternoon, a panel of experts from UNIDO will come to WU, and present their findings to a jury of UNIDO experts (D5.0.001).

The students will learn:

1. Design Thinking Approaches: to develop sustainable solutions.
2. Responsible Citizenship: the role of business in developing solutions for ending hunger, working with a multi-stakeholder perspective to develop proposals.
3. Reflective Critical Thinking: developing agile and reflective solutions; ability to formulate and apply innovative solutions to complex business and societal challenges in diverse contexts.

Students are required to attend 80% of the course.

Lectures, design thinking workshops, experiential learning, UNIDO field trip.

Active participation in the course will be sufficient to obtain 2 ECTS for this mandatory seminar.

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