TRA launches interactive youth lab article

DUBAI: The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), represented by the Youth Council, has launched the Interactive Youth Lab, an innovative initiative aimed at activating the role of youth and investing in their creative potential in discovering and finding solutions and ideas that contribute to the development of government initiatives and the work of the mGovernment sector.

This event comes as one of the events associated with the UAE Hackathon, the key event in UAE’s Month of Innovation 2019, where Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi was the first to experience the interactive youth lab with the participation of members of the Abu Dhabi Youth Council and a distinguished group of Emirati youth.

On this occasion, H.E. Hamad Obaid Al Mansouri, TRA Director General, said: "Since its inception, the UAE has been keen on empowering youth and enhancing their participation in society, and creating opportunities and initiatives to ensure that they realize their potential in various fields and to hone their skills through training programs provided by the best experts and researchers at various levels.

The youth are the ones who can change the world for the better, and today we seek to develop our strategies and plans in line with the forward thinking of young people.”

The Director General pointed out that young people have the energies and potentials that enable them to accelerate the pace of reaching the goals in record time, and added: "We, in the UAE, believe that achievements can only be made by combining experience with the spirit of the youth. Hence, all government bodies, departments and organizations in our beloved country have created homogenous groups of well-experienced staff and youth who have the potential, motivation and enthusiasm to move forward. We in the UAE are in dire need of our young people to keep pace with the rise of artificial intelligence and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We aspire to achieve UAE Vision 2021 by being guided by our wise leadership, drawing on the experiences of senior citizens and employees, and arming ourselves with the determination of our young Emirati generation."

In turn, Ammar Saif Al Shamsi, Chairman of the TRA Youth Council said: "The interactive youth lab initiative aims to enhance the role of young people and their place in decision-making and policy development, all in an interactive way that is based on proposing a problem or issue, followed by a brainstorming session in which a group of youth present their solutions and ideas and then vote for the best ideas to be adopted, developed and applied in practice.”

Al Shamsi pointed out that if the idea of the interactive youth lab is successful at the TRA level, it will be mainstreamed into corporate youth councils, and ultimately at the UAE level.

The TRA is keen to launch initiatives and projects that would stimulate creative thinking among young people and open doors for them to unleash their potentials in various real-time topics including science and innovation in cybersecurity, smart cities and infrastructure.

The TRA has already launched many youth initiatives such as ‘Seeds for the Future’, a learning and training initiative that provides students with a competitive platform to bring their innovative ICT ideas and projects to the forefront and allow them to transform their ideas into effective products and tangible realities through support from program partners.