Tatawwar: Building Tomorrow’s Minds, from HSBC and Potential.com, has announced the top 20 projects submitted by students. The finalists representing the Middle East and North Africa region include 2 students from Algeria, 2 from Bahrain, 4 from Egypt, 2 from Kuwait, 1 from Oman, 3 from Qatar, and 6 from the UAE. They have been chosen based on judging that took place during prototype workshops and the business model that they submitted online after they take the associated online courses.
This year’s edition of Tatawwar: Building Tomorrow’s Minds has seen4650 students from over 1000 schools register for blended learning programme. The Tatawwar team hosted 12 workshops for the shortlisted 250 students in each of programme’s countries in January and February followed by online mentoring and courses to help them develop their prototype and business models.
The top 20 finalists will now join an acceleration programme that includes twice-weekly webinars to help project owners fine tune their pitching skills, and learn key business skills including financial projections, raising funding, future career fitness, technology trends and marketing. Each webinar will bring together international experts on each of these topics to help the students. In addition, each of the top 20 students will be provided with four one-on-one coaching sessions and get a one-year free membership to their local fablabs, where they can continue to develop their prototypes.
The final awards ceremony will be live-streamed on the 9 May 2020 at 2pm UAE time, where the winners will be announced after having delivered their final pitches to judges the day before. The public is welcome to join and participate in the finals through Tatawwar’s Facebook page.
The top three winners’ prototypes will receive cash prizes of USD 5,000, USD 3,000 and USD 1,500 respectively.
Sabrin Rahman, Regional Head of Corporate Sustainability at HSBC, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, said, “We are thrilled with the response we’ve had to this year’s Tatawwar programme and have been hugely impressed with the ideas and business models that the students have developed. We are looking forward to working with the 20 finalists through the rest of the programme – the online workshops and coaching sessions have been carefully designed to provoke reflection and challenge current ways of working to stimulate innovative thinking for a sustainable future.”
Tatawwar: Building Tomorrow’s Minds is an interactive online and face-to-face programme that brings together students aged 15 to 18, schools, parents and the business community to innovate for a sustainable future by addressing one of three United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals:
- Climate Action
- Human Health and Well-being
- Clean Water and Sanitation
Two of the Tatawwar previous winners, Samah Abdullah from Egypt and Zoya Naeem from the UAE, have come up with innovative solutions to address the water scarcity challenge and crowdfunded their projects. Samah has developed and just released her first WMS App which is now available for download on the Google Play store.
