Nashon Adero (Kenyan), born in Homa Bay, Kenya. My education and training in Geospatial Engineering at the University of Nairobi, Kenya and later Resources Engineering at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany have not taken away from my passion for addressing the issues affecting youth and the policy-environment-society nexus. When I won the inaugural DAAD/ACCESS Idea Competition for African lecturers on addressing youth unemployment through higher education curriculum improvement on November 27, 2020, I instantly knew that my EMPOWER project on education was central to the victory. EMPOWER has empowering and inspiring examples of projects for improving lives and livelihoods in developing countries. Kenya, my homeland, joins this category with a young population whose median age is barely twenty. My life’s philosophy holds that my authentic duty is the excellent, responsible, self-driven and selfless service of my refined gift to the world. This philosophy powers my youth-mentorship model, which thrives on a foundation built on more than a decade of research on traditional and emerging issues around youth education and skills development as well as interacting with youth as a volunteer mentor under Kenya’s Presidential Digital Talent Program and a lecturer at Kenya’s mining university, Taita Taveta University (TTU). Therefore, besides my doctoral research at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg on developing models for enhancing mine surveying and planning, I was hungry for more and joined the EMPOWER program to advance a youth-centric project. The goal of my EMPOWER education project is to inform and calibrate evidence-based policies and strategies for enhancing transition rates into higher STEM education in Kenya. The project has given birth to Impact Borderless Digital (IBD), my program for empowering youth to be impactful, borderless in their mindset as influential global citizens, and harnessing the new horizons of the digital transformation wave. My ultimate vision is to help mentor a generation of youth who are empowered with education and skills for adaptive resilience in a changing world.  Join me on this noble journey of mentoring young talents to an exciting future.