rural youth Archives

Grooming rural youth in Cloud must for inclusive innovation in India: AWS (Tech Trend)

by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Entrepreneurship, Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Technology

By Nishant Arora,

New Delhi : Amid a talented pool of tech entrepreneurs and start-ups in India live millions of women and under-represented communities, chasing opportunities to enter the new digital world, and the onus is right on the tech giants to skill them and bridge the digital divide, says a top Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive.

According to Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector at AWS — online retail giant Amazon’s Cloud business arm — the time is now ripe for tech companies to approach talented youth in rural India, skill and connect them to the digital mainstream in order to achieve “inclusive innovation”.

“India is unique. You have this highly educated population of tech entrepreneurs and start-ups and then you go into villages which are like a different world altogether.

“You got to access the talent pool there, make sure that you skill them so that they have the capabilities and opportunities to take advantage of this whole new world,” said Carlson, who is viewed as one of the most powerful women in the global tech scene.

For her, healthcare and education are the two sectors that need big tech intervention.

“I think for India, we have to create new mechanisms to educate people in emerging technologies like Cloud computing. We did the same in Kenya with the non-profit Digital Divide Data (DDD) and trained 30-60 people (including women) in Cloud computing as a stepping stone to more advanced IT careers and saw positive results,” Carlson told IANS during her second visit to India last week.

Today, the DDD and AWS graduates are earning five times more than their peers.

“We put them through an intensive six-month training. We put them to work at the Kenyan National Museum and now we have them working in other vocations. They are now in jobs that pay about $85,000 a year. That is more than they would make in three lifetimes in Africa,” Carlson noted.

She knows that this training model works and now she wants to scale it up for countries like India.

In the US, Northern Virginia Community College, in collaboration with the “AWS Educate” programme, has launched a Cloud computing specialisation as part of its Information Systems Technology (IST) Associate of Applied Science degree that started this autumn.

The class has already started and during the AWS education summit recently, it launched the same programme with Los Angeles community colleges.

“I spoke to some of your government officials, including in the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC), in the last couple of days and asked them why don’t we do the same here for vocational training in Cloud computing,” informed Carlson.

AWS “EdStart” programme is helping entrepreneurs in India build the next generation of online learning, analytics and campus management solutions on the AWS Cloud. The programme is designed to enable EdTech start-ups move faster with specially-tailored benefits.

AWS “Edstart” members in India include start-ups like doubtbox, Classplus, Quizizz, NEETprep.com, examly, StudyBoard, Bloombench, Multibhashi, proctor, I&WE and bookbhook.com , among others.

Carlson, who started her career as a speech and language pathologist, also looks at the Indian health care scenario with hope in her eyes.

“When I was here on my first visit two years ago, one of the things that struck me personally the most was the number of start-ups with virtual healthcare applications running on AWS,” she recalled.

The start-ups were working in the field of mapping the cornea to identify heart disease.

“I thought about that a lot over two years and, in these years, the number of both the companies and tools available to take healthcare to the next level in India is kind of off the charts,” said Carlson.

To help accelerate the discovery of new, targeted treatments for patients, Accenture and Merck (known as MSD), in collaboration with AWS, this month decided to launch a Cloud-based informatics research platform.

“This is an example of how Cloud computing is truly allowing for innovations at speed and at scale that we did not even think about years ago. This is where I think India is just going to be at much advantage, owing to the growing healthcare start-ups,” added Carlson.

“We have to ensure that you have policies that allow these things to get moving on Cloud because what you don’t want is 80 per cent of your IT budget to be spent on maintenance of the systems,” Carlson emphasised.

She recalled an incident when she took Amazon Cloud computing and its benefits to the US government in 2010 and an official asked her: “Are you here to sell books?”

“Policymakers in India definitely have a clear idea of what Cloud is. Everybody knows what Cloud computing is now. The world has changed quickly so that is a good thing,” she said.

(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)

—IANS

Decent jobs for rural youth key to Africa’s prosperity: UN

by admin | May 25, 2021 | Employment, Overseas, World

FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva

Khartoum : Africa must, in coming decades, explore the entire food chain to create adequate jobs for young people, especially in rural areas, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation said on Thursday.

“Countries need to promote a rural and structural transformation that fosters synergies between farm and non-farm activities and that reinforces the linkages between rural areas and cities,” said FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva.

This includes processing, packaging, transportation, distribution, marketing and service provision, especially financial and business services, he said at FAO’s Regional Conference for Africa centered on the theme of creating decent and attractive jobs in the continent – the world’s youngest in terms of the average age of its population.

Estimates suggest that up to 12 million new jobs will have to be created every year to absorb new labour market entrants over the next 20 years, FAO said.

Today some 54 percent of Africa’s workforce – especially farming families – rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, income and employment, the UN agency said.

With more people moving to cities, demand on urban food markets will grow, which in turn can generate job opportunities in all agriculture-related activities, but more must be done to create non-agricultural employment in rural areas, including agro-tourism and other services, FAO believes.

“More than ever, strategic partnerships are needed to bring together the African Union, the African Development Bank and the UN system and other development partners,” Graziano da Silva said.

He pointed to FAO’s regional programme, “Youth Employment: enabling decent agriculture and agri-business jobs”, which goes beyond farm jobs and seeks to develop capacity and scale up successful approaches through programme formulation and partnerships.

But FAO urged measures to help smallholders and farming families as more profitable urban markets can concentrate food production in large commercial farms, with large processors and retailers dominating the value chain (products or services sold to consumers).

“Smallholders and family farmers need specific policies and regulations. This includes providing access to inputs, credit and technology and improving land tenure,” Graziano da Silva said.

Social protection programmes, including cash transfers can play a crucial role by linking public food purchases to family farmers’ production, he noted.

—IANS