7,000 innovators, 2,000 ideas for change, 1 incredible Technovation Girls season

The 2022-2023 Technovation Girls season is drawing to a close (help us celebrate on June 30, 2023 at our virtual Global Celebration event, where we’ll also be announcing the Finalist and Regional Winner teams). This was the biggest Technovation Girls season in our history! And it wouldn’t have happened without the incredible commitment and hard work of our volunteer Chapter Ambassadors, Club Ambassadors, Student Ambassadors, mentors, judges and all of the incredible folks who support them in running the program, recruiting girls and mentors, and making each season better than the last.

We were blown away by the girls who participated this year and their ideas to improve their communities using technology. You all inspire and motivate us, and we can’t wait to see where your changemaker journeys take you next. We’ll be sharing more stories of this season and the amazing stories from the global community in the weeks and months to come, but we wanted to start with a view by the numbers.

2023 Technovation Girls Country Participation Data

In 2022-2023, teams from 61 countries participated in the program, and 10 countries participated for the first time! Welcome to the Technovation community Panama, Senegal, Slovakia, Bahamas, and Estonia! 

And several countries showed large increases in registration in 2022 compared to 2021! Congratulations to Nigeria, Chile, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Cambodia, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and Ukraine on your amazing recruitment efforts this year!

Technovation Girls Participation and Submission Data

Nearly 7,500 girls on 2,000 teams submitted complete projects to the program this year. That’s 2, 000 ways the world got a little bit better this year, 2,000 communities that were changed, and 2,000 ideas to inspire us all to ask what we can change.

We are so proud of every single person who participated this year—and honored to be part of your journeys to become leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and changemakers. We know that Technovation Girls is just the beginning for you.

A closer look at projects

Of the 2,000+ projects submitted to the Technovation Girls competition this year:

• 17% of submissions used AI in their projects
• 25% of submissions addressed climate change
• 17% of submissions addressed hunger

We’ll share a larger breakdown of submissions by SDG category towards the end of this year! 

Additionally, we encouraged teams to use ChatGPT this year—345 teams used ChatGPT, with 64 of those teams citing “language” as their primary reason for using it (meaning they used it to support translations or grammar). We’re proud of these early adopters and excited to continue to build on our resources for teams interested in using AI tools in their projects in coming seasons.

Chapters and Clubs: A Quick Look

131 chapters representing 53 countries made this season possible. We were proud to welcome new ambassadors in Bosnia, France (Paris), the Republic of Georgia, Japan (Tokyo), Kenya (Kisumu), Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Spain (Barcelona, Madrid and Valladolid), Tanzania (Mwanza and Kinondoni), and the United States (Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, and Montana).

Ambassadors around the world worked incredibly hard to bring Technovation Girls to their communities and support girls as they worked through the program. We were thrilled to be able to bring back Regional Pitch Events for the first time since 2019, and hope everyone had a wonderful time celebrating their hard work at local events in areas where they were held. 965 teams participated in 35 official Regional Pitch Events across 16 countries. Some additional highlights from this season included:

• Welcoming a group of 9 Moonshot Ambassadors—new Chapter Ambassadors we connected with through STEM Next and their Million Girls Moonshot program.
• Hosting a series of Chapter Ambassador Exchanges, where Chapter Ambassadors traveled to meet and share information with fellow Chapter Ambassadors.
• 9 chapter ambassadors received a leadership acknowledgement award through peer nominations
• Chapters leveraged digital connectivity: One Canadian chapter ambassador virtually supported participants in Senegal and the Bahamas
• 60% of chapters reported growth and 93% are working to serve more under resourced participants.

Mentors and Judges: A Quick Look

Mentors support teams as they build their confidence and skills, by offering valuable feedback and encouragement along every step of the program. This season, over 6,500 volunteers signed up to mentor teams, and over 4,800 mentors matched with a team. To offer an additional way for mentors to get engaged (whether because they didn’t have time to commit to the full program cycle or because they had difficulty matching with a team), we ran a pilot program where mentors could work with several teams as a coach through one-off sessions.

We also ran mentor office hours this season so that mentors could connect with Technovation staff and with one another and address any questions and concerns they were having.

This season, we also welcomed 4,000+ volunteer judges from over 100 countries. Judges come from a range of backgrounds and can volunteer individually or as groups, and collectively provided more than 9,000 scores across both the quarter- and semi-final rounds of judging.

We are especially grateful to our corporate partners whose employees volunteered their time and want to shout out FactSet, Parsons, Salesforce, TEK Systems, MetLife, Keysight, EPAM, Shopify, Google, and Accenture for their high judge registration numbers.

Keep an eye out for more stories from this amazing season

We’ll be featuring stories from this incredible season, including more about the Finalists and Regional Winners, as well as details and learnings from some of the pilot programs we tested out this year.

If you can’t wait to participate again, join our email list to know the exact moment registration opens for the next Technovation Girls season.

We are in awe of this incredible community and the things we have collectively accomplished this year. Thank you to the students who were brave enough to take action, to the mentors and ambassadors and volunteers who supported them during every moment of the program, to the judges who gave thoughtful feedback to every team, and to all of our corporate and community partners who make Technovation possible. We are so proud of—and grateful to—all of you.