Visegrad Project: Policy-Making Hackathon for Young Entrepreneurs
Our Visegrad V4 Gen Mini-Grant project, in collaboration with partners from Poland and Ukraine took place in Budapest, Hungary in March 2025. This initiative’s aim was to foster youth entrepreneurship by engaging young people in a 5-day policy-making hackathon. The event focused on identifying main barriers and key solutions that could help young people become entrepreneurs after completing their education.
PROJECTS
9/18/20241 min read
We had the pleasure to organise our first Visegrad V4 Gen Mini-Grant project in March 2025 in cooperation with two partner organisations: Wielki Świat Foundation from Poland and Satellite NGO from Ukraine.
The project began with a preparatory meeting between representatives from SOYA and partner organisations, that took place in November 2024 in Warsaw. During the meeting we planned the structure of the hackathon and non-formal learning activities that we wanted to implement during the project, identified challenges and solutions for empowering young entrepreneurs, drafted a skeleton for a policy document which we would further develop together with the participants and discussed logistics.
We continued with the preparations for the projects in the following month and finally in March 2025 participants aged 18-25 from Hungary, Poland and Ukraine came to Budapest to explore together the topic of being a young entrepreneur and how policy solutions can support young people to become entrepreneurs.
For three days they participated in various activities, such as:
- Preparing a pitch for a start-up sprint in international teams and participating in discussions on their product ideas.
- Debating on different issues related to entrepreneurship, discussing controversial topics, and learning from each other’s experiences and perspectives.
- Video-making, poster-making and acting in other to understand better the perspectives of both young entrepreneurs as well as stakeholders.
- Explored the reality of becoming a young entrepreneur in their countries and shared their conclusions with others.
The project was concluded with the participants creating a policy document that summarized the insights and ideas they gathered to support young people in becoming entrepreneurs. The document has been sent to stakeholders in the region to help them understand the needs and challenges of youth regarding starting a business.
The project was financed by Visegrad V4 Gen Mini-Grant.