Central Asian young app developers rewarded at the YouthMobile Contest

3 April 2019

From November 2018 to January 2019, UNESCO held the Central Asian YouthMobile Contest challenging and leading youth in developing Free and Open Source solutions in support of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Twelve mobile phone applications were developed throughout the competition by sixteen young app developers aged 16-28 from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The Contest particularly encouraged the participation of young girls and women, contributing to highlight the under-representation of women in the technology sector, including in Central Asia. The final female participation rate of 87.5% demonstrates the success of UNESCO’s effort to promote gender equality through empowering girls with digital skills. The 14 female participants in the competition built and submitted eleven open source applications.

UNESCO Almaty awarded the first place prize to “AIR – Advance in Robotics”, a complex application was developed by heart
ers, a team of five girls from Kazakhstan (Nargiz Askarbekkyzy, Lyubov Dudchenko, Medina Shuriyeva, Diana Smagulova, Zhaniya Amangaliyeva). The app teaches coding and robotics. The members of the winning team, all young girls innovators thanked UNESCO for winning a computer for the first place in the YouthMobile competition.

“We are going to use it among our heart
ers team, further develop our application, and make it easier for children to be interested in robotics coding”, said Lyubov Dudchenko on behalf of the winning team.

During the final ceremony in Alamaty, Kazakhstan, last January, five other apps were given special recognition as some of the best in the contest, offering a great range of solutions relating to local communities. The top-performing apps include:

“Machmuai testho”: an analogue of the universal knowledge testing in Tajik and Russian languages;
“Alippe”: an augmented reality 3D app for books for children;
“Toktogul”: a community-based medium that fights against inequality;
“Kazahk Latin Converter”: a translator of texts from Kazak Cyrillic to Latin script;
“Zvook”: a hearing aid that recognizes and transfers the danger and specific sounds into vibration and light.

These applications, most of which are already available on Google Play store or App Store, propose ideas relevant to SDG 4 on Education, SDG 8 on Sustainable economic growth, SDG 9 on Innovation and SDG 10 on Inequalities.

The video recording of the award ceremony is available at the following address: http://en.unesco.kz/youthmobile-award

The YouthMobile contest was organized by the UNESCO Office in Almaty to encourage the development of open solutions in Central Asia, promoting access to information and sustainable development, and involving youth in building solutions to local community and addressing the Sustainable Development Goals.

The UNESCO YouthMobile initiative deploys and supports projects worldwide to promote training in digital technical skills and abilities among young women and men.

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©UNESCO Almaty