Challenge-driven social entrepreneurship and high impact student engagement.

The Center on Conflict and Development (ConDev) and the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University are collaborating to bring real-world experiences to students and meaningful solutions to communities in developing countries. Our inaugural activity consisted of a 48-hour Aggies Invent Social Entrepreneurship weekend that attracted 197 students from 33 different departments. We collected challenges from communities, NGOs, and USAID Missions in Senegal, Ghana, Botswana, the DRC, and Guatemala. Students worked with mentors to create mitigation prototypes. Our next step was to bring students to the field to co-create solutions addressing human-elephant conflict challenges in Botswana with local university students and community member end users.