Empower4Equality brings together students from engineering, arts, social sciences, and technology across EELISA to tackle real-world problems at the intersection of gender equality, social innovation, and sustainable development. Working in transdisciplinary teams spanning four European universities, participants move through a progressive learning journey: from building shared knowledge, to co-designing a solution, to building and defending a working prototype, first online and later on a physical hackathon in Bucharest.

Empower4Equality is built around three complementary learning approaches, each deliberately matched to what participants need at that stage of the journey. Research-Based Learning opens the activity: before imagining any solution, you must understand the problem deeply through data, existing research, and lived realities. Project-Based and Challenge-Based Learning takes over in the design phase, where ideas are stress-tested through iterative cycles of design, feedback, and revision. Finally, Service-Learning and Action-Oriented Learning drive the hackathon: you build a prototype that can be tested.

The journey, step by step

Phase 1 — Inquiry & Preparation: September – October 2026 · Online

Learning to ask better questions before proposing any answers.

The activity opens online with five short micro-modules (15–20 min each), each authored by a specialist from a different EELISA institution. These are not lectures: they are conceptual entry points designed to destabilise comfortable assumptions and open up the problem space.

– Social innovation & gender equality — how pursuing equity actively produces more innovative, livable, and sustainable organisations and communities.

– Art & Science collaborations — how to think across disciplines and leverage creative tension between different ways of knowing, rather than treating it as noise.

– ICT for social problems — the possibilities and social implications of technology as a tool for change; situating technical choices within their broader societal context.
Inclusivity in solution design — how vulnerability is unevenly distributed across social groups, and how policy and design can be made more responsive to those differences.

Engineering identity, sustainability & ethics — who you are becoming as an engineer, and what responsibilities that professional identity carries.
Each module feeds into live online seminars, where participants engage with facilitators and with each other across institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

Teams of 4–6 students are then formed and assigned two academic mentors from different fields. Together, each team conducts structured desk research on a challenge linked to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

What you produce: An analytical report (~3 pages) — a rigorous, evidence-grounded problem statement. This is your team’s first shared intellectual product, and the criterion for advancing to Phase 2.

The analytical report matters because defining a problem well is harder — and more important — than solving a poorly defined one.

Phase 2 — Collaborative Design & Prototyping: October – December 2026 · Online

Each week, teams will work through structured design sprints using collaborative digital tools (Miro, Notion, GitHub), facilitated by specialists in design methodology. Bi-weekly check-ins with your assigned mentors keep the work grounded and make the learning explicit — not just what you built, but why it changed.

What you produce: A project proposal (~6 pages) covering stakeholder analysis, theory of change, prototype sketches, implementation roadmap, and risk assessment — submitted alongside an oral mid-term pitch.

An evaluation panel then selects the finalist teams for the hackathon.

Phase 3 — Hackathon · Bucharest. March 2027 · Hybrid — Politehnica Bucharest

The culminating event is a three-day hybrid hackathon at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (UNSTPB). Finalist teams — some on-site, others participating remotely — build their prototypes under intensive, continuous mentoring.

 – Days 1–2 are dedicated to prototype development. Where feasible, teams test their solutions directly with real users and NGO partners through a service-learning component that closes the gap between academic design and lived impact.

 – Day 3 is the final pitch and live demonstration before a jury of external experts from academia, civil society, and industry — people with standing to evaluate not just whether the prototype works, but whether it matters.

What you produce: A functional prototype, a pitch deck (with impact assessment and sustainability plan), and an individual/team reflection report on the full learning journey.

The hackathon is not the end of the learning. It is the moment where the learning becomes undeniable.

WHEN

From Septermber to December 2026, with an onsite hackathon on Marcho 2027

WHERE

online from September to December

Onsite at POLITEHNICA Bucharest, Date TBD

APPLICATION

Apply until 20 September via Digital Campus