West African Youth Internet Governance Forum 2022
Building Digital Capabilities Of Youth In A Connected World**
Objective:
- Building regional and global capacity of youths in West Africa through capacity building in Internet Governance.
- Building a new cadre of Internet leaders who are motivated to learn, engage and act within the West African region and beyond.
- Mobilizing West African youths to participate in ICT development and policy beyond IG-specific topics.
- Partnering with more organizations to improve the participation of youths in Internet Governance discussions.
Tickets
Additional Information
Modern economies are transforming from agricultural and industrial economies to information and knowledge-based economies. Such rapid transformation has had a significant impact on social, economic, political and cultural development across the world. The rapidly advancing information and communications technologies (ICTs) help in addressing social and economic problems and offer opportunities for learning, skill and career development. It is hence necessary to be well positioned as a sub-region to partake and leverage these tools for growth.
Youths constitute a large percentage of Internet users who fuel growth and stand behind online social movements that bring important conversations to the limelight. This is particularly true for West Africa where the median age 18.2years with the growing need to equip these youth with digital skills and access to technology and markets in order to become tomorrow's innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders.
The World Bank reports that across the subregion, two main constraints to mobile broadband adoption are related to affordability: the high price of mobile services and low purchasing power, as indicated by low household consumption. These findings are consistent with the fact that mobile data prices in the subregion are among the highest in the world when adjusted for cost of living. Digital startups struggle to attract funding and ‘traditional’ businesses are only slowly adopting digital technologies and platforms to boost productivity and sales.
This one-day conference under the theme:Building Digital Capabilities of Youth in a Connected Worldexplores conversations on how youth can build skills and access resources which can translate to innovation and technological solutions to drive development.