KARACHI: Young students proudly explained their projects on display at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) City Campus on Thursday to various IT industry officers, officials and guests, including Sindh Minister for Education and Literacy Jam Mehtab Hussain Dahar.

The students were part of a project launched by the IBA in collaboration with the Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Youth Development Programme (BBSYDP), government of Sindh, involving over 450 underprivileged youth from all over the province to be trained in different four-month duration courses such as web designing, web development, multimedia and graphic designing, IT entrepreneurship, software development and office automation.

Rabab Fatima, a BCom Part II student, created a website that she named ‘Sharpeners’ from where she and her team offer graphic designing and front-end development assistance. “I didn’t realise that starting a business could be this simple,” she gushed.

‘VenueIT’, another website serving as a booking platform for venues to hold engagements, was the brainchild of Karachi University’s Department of Computer Science students Mohammad Furqan and Mirza Fasihullah Baig. “We would be collecting data on the places available along with their guest capacities for booking and then the people looking for venues will be able to find one suitable for them according to their budget,” said Furqan.

“People would be able to search for venues area-wise and according to their budgets through our website,” informed Baig.

“And for them we will have all the data available on shaadi/banquet halls and lawns. After that we are also planning to gather information about farmhouses where people may want to stay. Hopefully, hotels, too, would offer space through us,” Baig added.

‘Zee’s Craftland’, a website for displaying pretty crafts, was already sold. “Actually, I designed this website for a client,” said Kehkashan Ansari, a student of business administration.

Demonstrating their projects before industry experts and professionals can result in better job opportunities for them, it was explained during the certificate distribution ceremony later.

While congratulating the students, director of Information and Comm­unication Technologies (ICT) at IBA’s Centre for Information and Comm­unication Technology (CICT) Imran Batada shared how they had been successful in changing the mindset of students and building on their potential. He also said that a few of the students from the project were now interested in joining IBA degree programmes while a few of them also got jobs and some were even successful in selling their final-year projects. “Recently, IBA has also hired one resource from this batch,” he said.

Education Minister Jam Mehtab Hussain Dahar said that this was indeed a great initiative under the umbrella of BBSYDP that was initiated in 2008 and had provided training and education to the youth of Sindh to help them find employment and curtail poverty.

“The programme aims to provide opportunities for short-term employment and skill development to approximately 100,000 semi-literate and educated unemployed youth in Sindh for a period varying between three months and one year,” he said, while adding that the government’s focus was on education and that he was glad that IBA’s CICT came forward for this programme and trained 450-plus students in this batch alone.

Special Adviser to the CM on Science and Information Technology Dr Sikandar Ali Shoro, secretary of the Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Human Resource Research and Development Board Shariq Ahmed, Dean and Director of IBA Dr Farrukh Iqbal also spoke.

Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2017