My journey

My name is Nelly Andrade and I'm a recent graduate from an Engineering in Sustainable Development in Monterrey, Mexico. Coming from a country like Mexico allowed me to experience certain expectations that are currently held for women and girls. Just as an engineering student, being part of the 2% of women in the classes helped us realize that more women are needed in technology and that is our responsibility to inspire other girls to be creators of engineering for a better world.

I come from a very supporting family, yet, as the oldest of all my siblings and cousins it's almost a Mexican tradition to be responsible for leaving a good role for the youngest ones. So with a lot of hard work, I've had the amazing opportunity to lead initatives with incredible local and international organizations like the Hult Prize Foundation, the US Consulate in Monterrey, my university: Tecnologico de Monterrey, TECHO, the Institute for Municipal Planning, UN Women, Consejo de Acciones por México, and others. Where, with the participation of amazing teams, we've been able to have impact with 11 communities in Mexico, have developed at least 10 social programs, worked with +120 public schools and +2,300 young social entrepreneurs. With all of this, I've been able to not only inspire my family and local community, but girls, boys, and students from other cities and even different countries.

An issue that women face that I would like to change is give space and life to success stories leaded by girls and women in my country, my region and even in the world. Also, I believe that at least in Mexico we are missing real role models for girls other than actresses and that becomes a big issue because by the time girls have to decide their field of study, they very probably have no idea that they are capable of changing the world and their community with their skills and knowledge. Mostly because they've never seen other women do it. Recently I had the incredible opportunity of becoming the first Hult Prize National Director in Mexico, where we could bring into the next wave of social entrepreneurs 2,300 students from all around Mexico. Making students talk about, and come up with solutions to one of the worlds biggest issues: poverty in slums. To my surprise, most of the social entrepreneuership ideas and most of the teams were either made up of mostly women, or pointed to women in the slums.

Other than this, I would like to empower women to become creators of technology and to feature stories of women - and girls! - doing amazing things to create change in their communities. Currently I'm a Global Champion for Women's Economic Empowerment for Empower Women, an initative launched by UN Women and I have good relations with other women and technology-related issues in Latin America that with no doubt be happy to collaborate on bringing this into reality. I'm sure that being part of the world pulse training would be a great opportunity to continue working for this cause, since campaign creation and communication skills in the digital era we are living is not only a good-to-now skill but a must if we want to work for impact.