First place in YLA

How enthused, “This is an amazing programme, and I highly recommend it to students who would love to sharpen their leadership skills and entrepreneurship skills because I was able to learn ways to run a business with the goal of helping people in need. Teamwork is certainly very important and is also one of the biggest factors that led to our win. Everyone was fully committed to their specific roles throughout the competition, and despite our different backgrounds, the consistent communication and effort we put in were indeed fruitful. Therefore, I would like to encourage others and even myself to explore and be comfortable in making mistakes because we learn and improve from our mistakes.”

He added, “I am also able to do well in this competition because UTAR provided me a place to enhance my communication, teamwork and leadership skills. In the competition, we built our own website with software and managed the business’s finances. Other important skills are communication skills and negotiation skills as we need to deal with internal and external parties to collaborate with other businesses and secure B2B deals, as well as marketing and strategy planning. I was also able to apply business and finance knowledge learnt in the competition and hence, was also able to contribute to the team. So thank you UTAR and my lecturers.”

Aimed at equipping aspiring young Malaysians with skills and coaching them to become successful leaders across all fields and sectors, the competition required participants to build a social enterprise within the stipulated duration. The social enterprise created will then be judged based on its feasibility, social media engagement, social impact, sustainability and creativity. Each team was also assisted by two past YLA participants-cum-ambassadors, one current or ex-employee of McKinsey Malaysia as a coach and one professional from the industry as a mentor.

The topic assigned to How and his team was poverty, and their social enterprise business was called ProjectLangit. “The goal is to eradicate poverty, and during our research on this topic, we discovered that there were many B40 households in Malaysia who were badly impacted by the Covid-19 outbreak and were struggling to make ends meet. While talking with some of the B40 people, we also learnt that they have lost their jobs, while some only earned less than RM1,000 a month. Discovering all these problems further inspired our team to develop a solution through our social enterprise, to bridge the skill gap in digital marketing and technology,” explained How.

He added, “Our social business aims to empower B40 entrepreneurs in Malaysia by digitalising their small businesses and optimising the processes from their hands to end-users (consumers). Currently, we are in the first phase, and we are helping B40 women entrepreneurs in Malaysia by digitally marketing their baked products on social media and website. We aim to help more B40 entrepreneurs in Malaysia and ultimately eradicate poverty in Malaysia by creating a sustainable platform that provides equally accessible economic opportunities to everyone. Ultimately, our social enterprise also aims to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) because we are here addressing SDG 1: No Poverty, by doing our part to help eradicate poverty with our project as we are running a social-based enterprise. The profit earned is relatively low, but enough to sustain our business operation and future development. Most of the revenue goes to the B40 entrepreneurs we are helping. As time goes by, we can help more and more B40 entrepreneurs in Malaysia, and try to help more different communities that are usually overlooked by the society.”

Click the links below to learn about ProjectLangit:

ProjectLangit’s Insta: https://www.instagram.com/projectlangit.co/
ProjectLangit’s FB: https://www.facebook.com/ProjectLangit
ProjectLangit’s webstore： https://projectlangit-2.easy.co/