The 10th UNESCO-APEID meeting was titled 'The Future of Youth and Entrepreneurship Education’. This year it took place in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on 10 and 11 October 2024. The UNESCO-APEID meeting on entrepreneurship education is an annual gathering organized by the UNESCO Entrepreneurship Education Network (EE-Net) Secretariat at the UNESCO Regional Office in Bangkok. The EE-Net aims to provide a platform to increase understanding and knowledge about entrepreneurship education by engaging policymakers, educators, researchers, entrepreneurs, students, and communities through various activities and channels.

Alfraganus University, Uzbekistan, hosted this year’s meeting. Seven delegates of the UNEVOC Network participated along with a representative from the UNESCO-UNEVOC International Centre. The event gathered 200 participants from 35 UNESCO Member States, including educators, policymakers, practitioners and stakeholders in entrepreneurship.

The meeting aimed to promote entrepreneurial skills development and mindsets as crucial enablers for sustainable development, economic growth and innovation among youth. The keynote speeches, parallel workshops and discussions centered around four key topics:

1. Effective government policies and advocacy for youth entrepreneurship education;
2. Best practices in entrepreneurship education initiatives;
3. Youth-led startups addressing social, environmental, and technological innovation;
4. Building supportive ecosystems for youth entrepreneurship.

Since 2023 UNESCO-UNEVOC has been invited to the annual UNESCO-APEID meetings on Entrepreneurship Education. For this year’s meeting, the organizer allocated one parallel session to UNEVOC and its members to present Entrepreneurship Education in TVET and invited two other representatives from UNEVOC Centres to present their work in other parallel sessions.

Lenny Martini, UNESCO-UNEVOC's Regional Focal Point for Asia and the Pacific UNEVOC Network, represented the organization's Inclusion and Youth Employability team. She led the session in which UNESCO-UNEVOC Network members from Australia, Cameroon, China, Iran, Italy, Singapore and Uzbekistan presented their work in the areas of green, digital and social entrepreneurship education in TVET. The three sessions presented real cases from UNEVOC Network members that can be adopted and replicated in different places. The presentation from the UNEVOC Centre in Uzbekistan was received particularly positively by local participants, as it was strongly aligned with the country’s priority for this year, “Entrepreneurship and Youth.”

At this year’s meeting, the Special issue on entrepreneurship education in honor of Dr. Gwang-Jo Kim was launched. It features UNESCO-UNEVOC’s research article, ‘Promoting entrepreneurship education through the adoption of innovative and best practices in technical education and vocational training’. The paper covers the analysis of the stages of entrepreneurial learning in TVET institutions in Asia-Pacific, based on UNESCO-UNEVOC’s Entrepreneurial Learning guide, a framework for macro and micro factors influencing the transferability of best practices in Entrepreneurial Learning, and some recommendations on how to use the framework to replicate or scale up UNESCO-UNEVOC’s Innovative and Promising Practices on Entrepreneurial Learning practices.