[center]SEMINAR

THEME: FOSTERING YOUTH EMPOWERMENT WITH ICT

A speech delivered at the launching event of the book titled:

"EMPOWERING YOUTHS WITH 30+ LUCRATIVE ICT IDEAS: THE GLOBAL CURB TO UNDEREMPLOYMENT & UNEMPLOYMENT"

Accompanied with the launching of the book's e-Learning Forum website: www.pediak.com

On 29th October, 2016.

By

Jawolusi Oluwaseun Solomon

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Good morning ladies and gentlemen, invited guests, Distinguished Delegates and Associates.

Permit me to start by explaining the term "foster".
To foster means to "encourage or promote the development of an entity".

As it relates to this seminar, I will be discussing some viable ways ICT can be used to "foster" (i.e. to encourage and promote) youth development.

We all know there is an alarming rate of youths' disengagement in fully exploring their exuberant potentials due to the rising wave of economic recession being globally experienced. This limitation creates an unfavorable atmosphere for the vibrant youths to fully explore and exploit their various gifts, skills, talents, abilities and passions.

There are 3 major cadres of labour that drives a nation's economy. They are the skilled, the semi-skilled and the unskilled, and many youths belonging to any of these cadres are either faced with the problem of underemployment or unemployment.

For clarity, let me distinguish underemployment from unemployment.

Underemployment refers to the situation where an employed individual is underpaid, leading to job dissatisfaction because of inability to meet-up with desired standard of living.

While unemployment refers to a situation where a willing and capable individual who opts to work cannot secure a job because the opportunities are not available.

This is where Information and communication technology (ICT) comes to the rescue. It's unique networking ability cuts across borders, allowing an individual in one geographical location (country) to work for other individuals or corporate organizations spatially dispersed across another geo-location be it far or near makes it a perfect and viable tool to get the citizens of any country engaged.

In addition, ICT encourages self-employment through the easy creation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) because setting up most small scale ICT businesses is not capital intensive but majorly requires technical skills.

In this seminar, I will briefly discuss 5 out of my 30 lucrative ICT ideas worthy of investing in as a tech-entrepreneur:


1. Template Development & Sales:
This line of business is mainly for various IT oriented individuals. This business is not capital intensive.
Web developers or online software developers now create several prototypes for other web developers to use either for free customization which might require a watermark (logo or name) of the original owner on the interface of the design or for outright sales.

There are 3 major units that form the complete process cycle of templates development and sales:
• The template developers
• A channel serving as a vendor or marketplace to showcase the templates for sale, that is, a medium for the e-commerce process to be carried out.
• The end-users.

The template developers can innovate several genres of templates, depending on their areas of specialization and expertise. They can develop various types of templates either in editable Photoshop formats commonly known as PSD and editable Fireworks formats known as PNG ,or editable web page formats known as HTML. A graphic animation expert can also design and develop an animation template with modern tools. (Flash contents are out of market, and not supported by modern technologies, so I won't be talking about this kind of templates in this chapter).

• The marketplace serves as the intermediary between the template developers and the end users who are mostly web developers that understand all the technologies used for the prototype design and development. This marketplace is responsible for the e-commerce process, which entails the end user ordering for a particular template, being rightly billed and being mailed the shopped product. Good examples of prominent marketplaces are; Themeforest, Envato Market, ShutterStock, Templatemo and others.

• End-users are the buyers of the various categorized templates. They are mostly experienced in the manipulation of the web application development programming languages used for the development of the template, and are considered to be doing the lazy jobs due to the fact that templates developers have done most of the tasking jobs.

Continue reading @ www.pediak.com/seminar