BANGKOK, 29 May 2019 – The Telenor Youth Forum’s 2018-2019 program concluded this week at the dtac headquarters in Bangkok, where the delegation of 16 young leaders from eight nations pitched their four digital services to Telenor Group and dtac leadership, including experts from Plan International, UNICEF and the Nobel Peace Centre, Rakbankerd, and dtac CEO Alexandra Reich.
Each year, the Telenor Youth Forum brings together young change leaders for six months of intense development work and remote collaboration spread across nations. There were two delegates from Thailand. Cherngchay Tacho’s team worked on a digital platform to raise mental health awareness. And Thanapa Ukaranun’s team worked on an app to connect the elderly to potential customers interested in learning skills from them, such as cooking or handicrafts.
Targeting inequalities in the rice supply chain in Asia, the team of youth delegates behind AgriMatch, a mobile application that uses geolocation to connect farmers to middlemen and vice versa, has won the Telenor Youth Forum 2018-2019 cycle and USD 15,000 (THB477,000) in seed funding.
The winning team, AgriMatch aims to pilot their service in Myanmar where more than 70 percent of the population relies on agriculture as their primary source of income, according to a 2019 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report. They will continue their ongoing collaboration with Network Activities Group (NAG) Myanmar, helping to advance the agenda of the Good Agricultural Practices certification which promotes sustainable agriculture for the people and the environment.
