Mobilising mobile technology
Youths around the world gather in norway to develop ideas that address social needs.
THE mobile phone has evolved from that bulky brick-sized device to the slick and stylish gadget of today, but that’s not the only thing that has changed.
Trends, business strategies and initiatives have changed too and that led Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor to organise the Telenor Youth Summit which aims to promote the use of mobile technology to address social and economic issues.
The inaugural Telenor Youth Summit was a three-day event held on Dec 9 to 11 in Oslo, Norway. Twenty-five participants from countries such as Montenegro, Thailand, Bangladesh, Denmark and India were chosen based on their ideas on the theme.
Each country had two representatives. The Malaysians were chosen by local telecommunications company DiGi through a contest for youths aged 18 to 25 who pitched their ideas on using technology to facilitate social change.
Universiti Islam Antarabangsa law student Farah Fathiah Fauzi, 20, took her project FemStoria – a support system for marginalised women – to compete in the contest and won, together with INTI International University pre-university student Wong Gwen Yi, 19, who pitched an idea-sharing platform for school teachers.
“The summit helped us to grow personally because of the people we met and the exposure. It also helped us to figure out the direction for our initiatives and what to look out for to develop our own projects,” said Farah.
The participants were divided into groups based on the cause they wanted to champion and on the last day, each group submitted a proposal to Telenor on ideas telecommunications companies could implement to empower social change.
“We came up with a list of recommendations which was a call for action that we had brainstormed for the industry and it was great because we were learning from each other (the participants) about what’s going on in their countries,” added Gwen Yi.
Apart from the usual seminars and workshops, participants also joined the audience for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize award presentation.
This year’s laureate was the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and it held an exhibition at the Nobel Peace Centre which the participants visited as well. The exhibition was the highlight of the trip for the two Malaysian representatives to the Telenor youth Summit Farah Fathiah Fauzi and Wong Gwen yi in front of the iconic Oslo Opera House in norway. Malaysian youngsters.
On top of that, Wong and Farah also attended the Telenor Youth Summit CNN recording.
“The OPCW exhibition was the highlight because the organisers brought in actual weapons used in chemical warfare and we learnt so much from the excursion, but the CNN show was another surprise as we got to see how a television recording was done,” Wong said.
Telenor Group CEO and president Jon Fredrik Baksaas, who spoke at the event, said that this digital generation understood how connectivity and access to the Internet could improve societies and Telenor wanted to help them realise their solutions.