United Nations Academic Impact is officially partnering with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on their first ever Solve Challenge, and we need your ideas! Solve is a new initiative from MIT that hopes to tackle some of the world's largest challenges by bringing people from various background together in order to come up with solutions and create projects to test those. Through crowdsourcing of ideas, Solve hopes to build a community of technologists, researchers, business leaders, social entrepreneurs, change agents, and policy makers to support the selected projects from inspiration to experimentation and action and scalable implementation by providing feedback and mentorship.

MIT Solve works around four pillars

Learn- to provide quality education by 2050 to anyone, anywhere who wants to learn

Cure - to leverage innovations in healthcare delivery and medical research to make care affordable and universally available

Fuel - to double energy and food production and halve carbon output by 2050, setting a path to net-zero carbon emissions by the end of the century

Make - to provide the infrastructure and economic opportunity to support a world population of nearly 10 billion by 2050

This year, there are three active challenges looking for participants and solutions.

Refugee Education (Learn pillar, and the Sustainable Development Goal 4) - How can we improve learning outcomes for refugee and displaced young people under 24?

Carbon (Fuel pillar and Sustainable Development Goal 7 ) - How can individuals and corporations manage their carbon contributions?

Chronic Diseases (Cure pillar and Sustainable Development Goal 3 ) - How can we help patients and caregivers prevent, detect, and manage chronic diseases.

If you have an idea on how to answer these questions, submit your solution and you may be invited to make a pitch in front of a Solve panel of judges at the United Nations Headquarters in March 2017. Finalists will be selected and provided with mentorship, training, and networking opportunities to make their ideas a reality. The deadline for submission is 20 January 2017.