Youths from 15 to 18 years old will be very much a part of the “Olympics of ICT” when they present and showcase their business ideas at next month’s World Congress on IT (WCIT) taking place from 18 to 22 May at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre.
These very young adults will be in the company of the giants of the IT world such as Dr. Vinton Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google and Father of the Internet, Dato’ Dr. Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel Corporation, and many other luminaries from the ICT world.
These youths have completed the Money Tree programme, which teaches and coaches children from 9 to 19 years old on financial, investment and entrepreneurship. The presentation of their business ideas is the culmination of their training in Money Tree.
Several of these ideas are ICT related and have real world solutions in mind. Such as the online event organizer or the search engine enhanced by social networking are ideas that seek to bring greater innovation and improvements to our life.
“Ideas and ICT have created positive impact to the Global economy. Ideas can come from anywhere including youths. For this reason, Money Tree is proud to show what the young are capable of during WCIT2008”, says Gerard Lim, CEO of My Money Tree Sdn Bhd, the Malaysia licensee and subsidiary of Money Tree Asia Pacific Ltd (Hong Kong).
The Money Tree programme has trained more that 2,000 youths in the past 1 year.
The key to this programme is it’s effective learning models, comprising of an Academy that delivers face-to-face coaching sessions, a portal that enable continuous learning via e-learning and its many activities, boot camps and workbooks, all combining to deliver an impactful learning experience.
It’s effective learning model through various interactive scenarios, whereby participants are given credit cards, cash, investment certifications and put through a ‘mini economy’ in which earning, spending, saving and investing are part of the syllabus in the programme.
Gerard adds, “Our mission in empowering youths to build a sound financial future does not stop here. In fact, we are in the midst of setting up a Young Entrepreneur Start-up Fund (or better known as the Y.E.S. Fund) that will complete the whole development process. Under the Y.E.S Fund, we will provide young entreprenuers from our programme with both the financial resource and skillsets required in their pursuit of setting up a business.”
The MONEYTREE programme is a proprietary programme developed by My Money Tree Sdn. Bhd. with license from Money Tree Asia Pacific Ltd. MONEYTREE is currently being conducted in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong with more centres opening soon in Brunei and Indonesia.
