Ooredoo and a delegation of young people from the Mena region and Southeast Asia will participate in the Global Youth Summit: BYND 2015 in Costa Rica from September 9 to 11.
Led by chairman HE Sheikh Abdullah bin Mohamed bin Saud al-Thani, Ooredoo will bring together a young delegation from across its global footprint to represent the achievements and aspirations of the next generation at the international event.
The summit is being held by International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations. It will serve as a platform for young people to be included in the 21st century’s most important decisions.
Ooredoo is bringing its experience of empowering youngsters and supporting youth employment to the event. “Ooredoo is a founding partner of the Global Youth Summit as we believe that supporting the needs and aspirations of the next generation is an essential duty of communications companies. The ideas and recommendations of the event will make a major contribution to human growth and development in the coming years,” said HE Sheikh Abdullah.
The delegation includes young developers, innovators and engineers, as well as aspiring leaders from a diverse range of communities. It also includes people who have made an impact on their community and who have ideas on how to change their world for the better using ICTs.
In total, the delegation has gathered 27 youngsters from Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Iraq, Indonesia, Algeria, Tunisia as well as Yemen and Palestine.
The youth delegation from Qatar will include Qatari nationals Hassan Ali al-Mulla and Asma Jaber al-Haram, both of whom were sponsored by Ooredoo through university and are now working in the company. They will be joined by eight talented young Qatari nationals hosted by ictQATAR.
The event, held under the theme BYND 2015, will be attended by 500 young delegates from around the world, along with a number of “summit elders”. Discussion of the event will develop into a global conversation via a vast social media network.
In the build-up to 2015, which is the deadline for member-states of the United Nations to achieve their Millennium Development Goals, global leaders will need to review their progress on the same and devise new goals.
Throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia, Ooredoo has been a leader in mobile development in support of human growth, including in the fields of women’s empowerment, education, healthcare and employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for young people.
One of the most prominent examples of Ooredoo empowering youth has been in Tunisia, which has a youth unemployment rate of 30%. In response, Tunisiana - which is a part of Ooredoo - launched in April 2013 the Najja7ni Employment mobile service in partnership with Silatech.
Najja7ni Employment provides career guidance, financial literacy, career search strategies, links to local training opportunities and tips on how to start a business. The response – with more than 300,000 customers signing up for the service in the first month – is indicative of the urgent demand for mobile services in this area.
In a few weeks, Ooredoo will announce key findings from a major research project on how the youth use technology across the Middle East and Asia, with a view to understanding the needs and aspirations of the next generation.
Ooredoo expects the key findings to influence both corporate and government policy decisions around the world as they reach out to a growing tech-savvy youth population.