Youth Forum

Hong Kong, China to host Asia-Pacific’s first ITU Youth Forum

The International Telecommunication Union will hold its first Youth Forum for the Asia-Pacific region in conjunction with its TELECOM ASIA 2002 Exhibition and Forum, to be staged at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre from 2 to 7 December. Today’s young people are tomorrow’s leaders. It is with this in mind that the Union launched its Youth Forum Initiative at ITU TELECOM AFRICA 2001 in November last year. The main purpose of the ITU TELECOM Youth Forum is to create a platform for talented young students to participate in the Union’s world and regional TELECOM events and discussion programmes with a view to introducing them to information and communication technologies (ICT) at an early stage in their career development.

Building on the positive experience gained at AFRICA 2001, ITU invited all its Member States in the Asia-Pacific region to nominate candidates to participate in an essay competition open to all university students between 18 and 23 years of age. Member States then coordinated with national universities in their countries to identify and submit candidates for competition in line with the established selection procedure and deadlines.

Candidates were requested to prepare an essay of between 250 and 500 words on the subject: “Meeting the challenges of the Information Age — Development opportunities and the role of Youth”. Essays were accepted in English, Chinese, Arabic and Russian, with a preliminary selection made by participating universities throughout the region. A total of 41 Member States, in coordination with their national universities, responded.

Some 199 essays were evaluated by the ITU Youth Forum Steering Committee, which found many of them to be of a very high standard.

In all, 77 fellowships were awarded to 38 women and 39 men throughout the region to participate in the ASIA TELECOM 2002 Youth Forum Programme.

“I hope that those of you who come to the event itself — the ICT leaders of tomorrow — will find the experience constructive, both personally and professionally, and will use the experience to further telecommunication development across the region,” says ITU Secretary-General, Yoshio Utsumi.

The winning essays illustrate not just the standard of the contributions received, but reinforce the important role. Already, a special Web-based chat room developed by ITU TELECOM to allow the Youth Forum Fellows to share ideas via the Internet has proved highly popular. For example, many of the selected students have been able to discuss the Youth Forum Programme well ahead of their arrival in Hong Kong.

To celebrate the achievement and participation of the Youth Forum Fellows, ITU Member States are invited to organize a “Winners’ Ceremony” at national level, in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This will help to create awareness of the Youth Forum Initiative and further motivate emerging young talent. A progress report will be published in ITU News after the TELECOM ASIA 2002 event.