AIESEC started swapping business students to help heal postwar Europe
In 1948, with European factories short of managers and neighbouring countries still wary of one another, a Stockholm official and two students from Czechoslovakia and Belgium set up a scheme to send young economists abroad for work placements. Among its later alumni are Japan's Junichiro Koizumi, Italy's Mario Monti and Nobel laureate Martti Ahtisaari.
Students had long arranged foreign internships on their own, but the war stopped that almost everywhere; only the neutral Scandinavian countries kept exchanging students through 1944. Bertil Hedberg of the Stockholm School of Economics, along with Jaroslav Zich and Stanislas Callens, founded the association on July 2, 1948, with its first headquarters in Prague and Zich as president. The aim was twofold: supply rebuilding businesses with trained talent, and mend relations between nations by letting young people live and work in each other's countries.
The name began as a French acronym for an international association of students in economics and commercial sciences, though the long form has been dropped now that members come from every field. Seven countries sent students to the first congress in Stockholm in 1949, the year 89 exchanges took place. By 1955 there were more than 1,000 a year. The United States joined in 1957, followed by Colombia, Venezuela and South Africa in 1958. American Morris Wolff became the first Secretary General in 1960 and opened a permanent office in Geneva.
Growth continued steadily: 43 countries by 1969, and in 2010 the first year with over 10,000 exchanges. Today the organisation, headquartered in Montreal, counts around 40,000 members, mostly aged 18 to 30, and holds consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council.
Its programmes include short volunteer projects tied to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, professional internships lasting from six weeks to a year and a half, and teaching placements. The organisation has also appeared nine times on a list of freedom-centred workplaces, based on assessments by its own people.
Source: AIESEC
