To transform 36 million adolescent and youth into future ready workforce through skills, education and counselling, ‘Konnect’ stands as a platform for all adolescents and youth in Bangladesh. Konnect connects adolescents especially aged between 10 to 24 through both online and offline activities ensuring collaboration and co-creation within adolescents and development partners.
On February 1, 2018 Honorable Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated “Konnect” (www.konnect.edu.bd). Since then more than 3.5 lac adolescents are active user and its getting popularity among youth. It has been enriched with more than 25000 edutainment contents based on life skills, STEM based Experiments and comics, books, movies etc. developed by adolescent development partners and youths.
Konnect organizes various online & offline competition for adolescents throughout the year. The competitions come with different theme to cover nationally important agenda where participants can showcase their ability & talents, compete each other for the championship. More than 5 lac student participated various competition titled ‘My District, My pride’, ‘Book Shows the light, It tells the dream!’, ‘Childhood of Father of Nation/My childhood/ My Freedom’, ‘Amar Mujib GemiQuiz’, ‘Fulbondhu quiz: Liberation war’, Language’ have been organized through this platform.

http://konnect.edu.bd/

• Bangladesh

• Youth
• Women
• The unemployed
• adolescents,

This initiative is a comprehensive online and offline platform for adolescents and youth to promote future ready workforce through skills, education and counselling. It could be replicated in other countries with similar context for developing human resources in different sectors using ICTs as enabler. This initiative is self-evolving and a platform to generate new ideas. So, replicating this initiative could bring some changes in other countries.

1. ICT division under Ministry of communications and Information Technology will take the lead to disseminate ICT based skills development program for the adolescents through this platform.
2. Directorate of secondary and higher Education (DSHE) will take the ownership of connecting students in one platform to give them project based activities and monitoring them too.
3. Directorate of Health will disseminate Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) awareness program through this platform to reach and implement maximum number of adolescents.
4. Sheikh Rasel Digital Lab of Directorate of Information and Communication Technology will incorporate Konnect as part of their regular lab class activities regarding safe internet uses.
'konnect' technical part is managed by a reputed public university named Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST). Computer Science and Engineering department of SUST maintain the system. Thus government organizations are directly involved as technology and content partner. Also private sector and development partners play role of content production and activity design. A decade long initiative called 'Generation Unlimited' in Bangladesh hosted jointly by unicef, a2i, BRAC and World Bank also addressed Konnect as a soft skills development platform within GenU activities.

The common desire and commitment reflected in WSIS Declaration of principles is not to create digital divide at an international as well as at a national level and build a people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life, solve their problems using ICT, premised on the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and respecting fully and upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The main focus of this portal is to move forward adolescent and youth into future ready workforce through skills development, education and counselling, and not to divide digitally to them those are directly aligned to the outcome of WSIS. This portal will gradually be integrated with the Ministry of Education and Health as their part of servicing students, adolescents as well as learners.