A team of Dublin City University students will represent Ireland at a global competition for social entrepreneurs over the next few days.
The Enactus World Cup brings together the next generation of business leaders and innovators from 32 countries, all hoping to secure the world title.
The DCU team won the Irish title in a virtual event in May, seeing off competition from eight other third level institutions.
The opening round of the global competition gets underway today, with the winner due to be announced on Friday.
Speaking on Morning Ireland, Kevin Cogan, DCU student and Team Ireland member said he is hopeful they will take the title this year.
"We are very optimistic, we have put in a lot of work," he said.
Team Ireland will showcase a number of business projects during the virtual event, including an innovative software application that aims to help members of the dyslexic community with their reading, by making websites more accessible.
Cogan said he got the initial idea for Dyslex.ie while in secondary school. He then went on to study Computer Science in DCU where he created the software with the DCU Enactus team.
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"Dyslex.ie tries to improve the visual elements of websites by increasing the line spacing, word spacing and background colour, as well as offering features like word lineation," he said.
As part of the competition the students have submitted a video presentation about Dyslex.ie and their other projects, which will be judged this week.
In the opening round they will compete against South Africa, The Netherlands and Eswatini and will find out tomorrow if they will progress to the semi-final.
Last year the Enactus World Cup took place in California, however this year it will all take place online as a virtual event due to the pandemic. Cogan said this will allow more people to get involved.
"Last year only a handful of people got to go to California. This year all of Ireland and the world can attend the virtual event over the next few days if they want, which is great. You can view the project presentations and listen to motivational speakers on the Enactus website."
It has been a long journey for the team to get to this point, and Cogan said he has learned a lot about what is involved in setting up a business.
"It is definitely hard work. You hit loads of brick walls but you just need to persevere. While setting up Dyslex.ie I have encountered loads of problems but then I get texts from people telling me that the software is making a huge difference in their lives and that makes all the hard work worth while at the end of the day," he said.
