World Entrepreneurship Day is the internationally recognized day for the celebration of entrepreneurship. It is celebrated on the second Friday of every April (this year being April 16th). WED was founded in 2009 by a college student and her mentor. After only eight weeks of marketing and partnership building, 22 countries joined the inaugural WED celebration. Individuals, companies, universities, K-12 schools, and organizations joined the worldwide celebration by hosting events, organizing activities, or throwing parties.
WED has grown rapidly since then. Its event partners, or Country Champion Groups, around the world are now hosting high level events to advance entrepreneurship within their countries. Here is a great example from the Philippines, the fifth largest country in the world:
"In the Philippines, we will start World Entrepreneurship Day in the morning with an Entrepreneurs' Run, leading to a 5,000 person convention, ending with a celebratory concert for all." - NEIL HUELE, WED CHAMPION, THE PHILIPPINES
WED Country Champion Groups work towards one common goal: leverage their creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, and innovative skills to work towards solutions for their nation's greatest challenges. After all, that's what entrepreneurship should do - solve a problem. Here is an example of this:
Because of the economy, the majority of Senegalese women are forced to give up their education before they even reach high school. For this reason, we worked with Oumar Diaw in Senegal to train 200 female middle school children in entrepreneurship. After the lessons, 14 year old Aida said, “This freely given training will change my life forever cause I couldn’t imagine it was possible to learn such things like how to create a company and run it successfully!" For his work on WED, Oumar was awarded the Sawa Global Hero Award.
For more information, visit: http://www.worldeshipday.com/