Shoaib Rizvi
Faculty of Information and Media Studies student Shoaib Rizvi spoke at the Youth Assembly at the United Nations in New York earlier this year, after being one of three youth worldwide to receive an Outstanding Youth Delegate Award.
When he came to Canada in 2010, Rizvi experienced a culture in which women received support, resources, encouragement and were seen as a driving force in the country’s economic success. It was something he didn’t see much of back home in Pakistan.
It was four years ago when Rizvi began waging an uphill battle against the conventional patriarchy in Pakistan by initiating his ‘I Am an Entrepreneur’ campaign, which provides microloans and mentorship training to skilled women who have the passion and drive to start their own ventures, but lack the necessary resources.
Rizvi has been a speaker at several high-level conferences on sustainable development including the Winter and the Summer Youth Assembly at the United Nations, the World’s Challenge Challenge at Western and was the youngest person to address the Undergraduate Awards Global Summit in Dublin, Ireland. This past summer, Rizvi was an intern at the United Nations World Tourism Organization and was also selected from worldwide cohort of over 10,000 applicants to participate in UNLEASH Innovation Lab 2017, a nine-day social innovation lab in Copenhagen, Denmark.
