Design Challenges for Students in Kosovo

Increasing students’ practical skills by confronting them with real-life challenges faced by companies

Why Design Challenges and how?

Providing a fertile ground for economic innovation is a key factor for Kosovos future development. To promote innovation, design challenges can be a fruitful instrument. In design challenges, young people learn skills and methods to approach real-life challenges and develop their own solutions to tackle these problems. 

The Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH supported with its project Creating Employment Through Export Promotion (CETEP) the implementation of a design challenge project through the locally operating IPKO Foundation (IF). With the support of CETEP, IPKO Foundation implemented the project called Koslift. It is a project that helps students to acquire practical skills for real-world challenges in companies from various sectors such as energy, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and manufacturing. In workshops, trainings and design challenges, students acquired skills and capacities to support, for examples, research and development in the respective sectors. Thereby, not only the competitiveness of Kosovar businesses is promoted, but also the students' competitiveness on the labour market. 

The project ran from June 2019 until February 2021. As part of the project, Koslift planned and carried out four rounds of design challenges. CETEP supported from the second round onwards. Over the course of the project, 288 students received the opportunity to compete in various challenges, motivated by a reward of a 2,000 Euro grant and an internship position for the winners. 

To learn more about how the design challenges worked, application process, workshops, the results and benefits, you can read the story below on three different languages: Albanian, English and Serbian:

Albanian (LINK)

English (LINK)

Serbian (LINK)