Ideas and opportunities are aplenty, but how many innovative minds go on to making it big in the global arena and get to unleash their creativity at making the world a better place? It is to bridge this gap that the Telenor Youth Forum (TYF) encourages young leaders to present their ideas that can effect change. This year, Paridhi Rustogi from New Delhi and Sharad Sagar from Patna are all set to represent India at the TYF at Oslo, Norway, in partnership with the Nobel Peace Centre.
This year’s theme is Digitisation for Peace. Sharad, a graduate in International Relations from Tufts University, U.S, and the CEO of Dexterity Global, a startup, explains what helped him reach the finals. “I founded Dexterity Global when I was still in school, in 2008. My experience of schooling and the innumerable opportunities that students can explore, but are often unable to, played an instrumental role in the startup,” he says.
“I didn’t go to school till I was 12 years old as I was home-schooled. During this period, I made optimum use of the computer and the Internet to find myself opportunities such as U.N News conferences. When I eventually went to school, I discovered that the different opportunities were something most of my friends had not heard of. I realised that this happened not because they were not competent enough but because they were not well-informed. Thus, in 2008, I started working on creating a platform where my friends could be connected to such opportunities and could also brush up their skills,” he elaborates.
“The founding principle of Dexterity Global is to give more middle-school and high-school students a platform that helps them unlock their dreams, and consequently, create leaders of tomorrow. When the TYF came along, its focus was on digitisation of peace. I was excited to read more about it as there were so many similarities between what Dexterity focussed on and what Telenor was looking at — quality education for all.”
Sharad is working on an app — DexConnect — specifically for TYF, which will list every possible opportunity in the world for middle-school and high-school students. This can range from the NASA Space Settlement contest to local scholarships, and so on.
He talks about how, with respect to the NASA Space Settlement contest, the maximum number of entries NASA received in the last 10 years is 953. “If there are over two million kids who can participate and only around 900 have signed up, there is a problem. We plan to fix this by way of DexConnect. Students can sit in the comfort of their homes, check out opportunities and sign up for them right away.”
Water security
Paridhi Rustogi, a final-year student of Environmental Engineering, DTU, who will be accompanying Sharad to Oslo, says that she has had an exciting journey and many participants had varied ideas.
However, though many emphasised education, working out-of-the-box and methodologies for creating opportunities for people, few dealt with environment. So, she decided to examine the Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6) and pitched the idea of clean water and sanitation. Paridhi holds that in terms of logistics, basic features about water bodies such as transparency, depth or even water quality can be figured out using simple probes. “If people have these probes, all they have to do is give the data back in numbers. The numeric data can be analysed by people who work in the field.”
She further explains how, at the urban level, a project like this may probably not be well-suited and this prompted her to speak about gamification apps. “Apps, like Pokemon Go, require people to move out of their houses to play. I spoke about creating an app interface wherein, if people help in conserving water bodies by actually carrying out water action, they can rack up some sort of social karma or water points.”
The one-year TYF programme will be held at Oslo between Dec. 8 and 11, during the Nobel Peace Prize week. Here, the selected delegates will work in teams to design solutions to address major social challenges. This will be followed up by virtual teamwork (after the Oslo event) along with a meet-up in Bangkok in May 2017. This will culminate in the unveiling of the teams’ digital exhibitions at the Nobel Peace Center in October.
