Hugo Pereira has been elected chairman of the board of AIESEC - the largest international organization run exclusively by students and recent graduates from 110 countries and territories, whose mission is "to develop leaders who can be agents of change in society". Hugo Pereira is 24 years old and has a degree in Management from the Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão (ISEG), of the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.
In 2005, Hugo Pereira ran for Director of International Relations for AIESEC at ISEG, and after a year he took over the leadership of the local branch. He is vice-president of AIESEC International and will take over the presidency next July, after the election on February 19th.
The application involved around 30 questions, biography, CV, summary and main strategy for the coming years. He spoke for ten minutes, followed by a panel on global issues and trends with the Economist magazine, followed by 5 hours of questions with the regions where AIESEC is present (Western and Northern Europe, USA and Canada; Latin America, Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe) and ended with a 3-minute speech. The vote was carried by an absolute majority at the Tunisian Congress and currently selects 19 collaborators (from six continents and more than a dozen nationalities).
AIESEC was founded in 1948 and has been in Portugal since 1959. It is currently the world's largest organization run exclusively by students, with 23,000 members from 1,100 universities. It has a network of 800,000 Alumni (former members) and establishes worldwide partnerships with more than 3,500 organizations. It sees itself as the "international platform that allows young people to discover and develop their potential, providing 5,000 leadership opportunities a year". AIESEC also runs an International Internship Program through which it carries out 4,500 exchanges a year, establishing privileged contact between universities and companies.
AIESEC members with experience and interaction with AIESEC Alumni in Portugal: Cavaco Silva (President of the Republic) and Murteira Nabo (Chairman GALP Energia). World Alumni are, for example, Martti Ahtisardi (Nobel Peace Prize winner), Helmut Kohl (former Chancellor of Germany), Janez Drnovsek (former Prime Minister of Slovenia) and Junichiro Koizumi (former Prime Minister of Japan). Kofi Annan (former UN Secretary General), Durão Barroso (President of the European Union) and John F. Kennedy (former President of the United States) are examples of some of the world figures who endorse the organization and support its activities.
