AICTE, UGC, UNICEF and YuWaahflag off week-long event ‘YuWaahEchoes’
NEW DELHI : The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), University Grants Commission (UGC), UNICEF and YuWaah (Generation Unlimited India) have launched ‘YuWaah Echoes’, a series of national innovation challenges, art competitions and multi-level quizzes around COVID 19 to enhance the knowledge of students of colleges and universities in India and encourage them to utilize their skills, talent and creativity in a much more meaningful way around COVID 19.
As part of the larger Young Warrior movement to enable young people in India to take action against COVID-19, YuWaah Echoes will be a week-long virtual event filled with knowledge sessions, talks, presentations, competitions and challenges focusing around COVID-19. This is an opportunity by individual institutions to engage students to take part in a unique learning and experiential journey around COVID-19, by expressing, innovating, learning, change making and building resilience. The four main activities of the initiative include:
• Solve-A-thon: A unique innovation challenge that encourage students from colleges and universities across India to register as individuals/teams and submit their ideas on how best to uphold Covid-19 Appropriate Behaviour(CAB) in their peer networks and communities.
• Artists Unite: Artists Unite aims to engage, incubate and give a platform to Young Warriors for self-expression through art. In this hybrid space, young people will get an opportunity to express and amplify their voice through musical poetry ‘Open Mic’.
• Quizmasters: A multilevel, interactive team quiz competition integrated with the Young Warriors Knowledge Hub, aimed at engaging young people across regions with verified information to combat COVID-19
• COVID Academy: A free one-stop multi-media knowledge hub curated with over 400 learning materials on COVID-19 and allied issues faced by young people during the crisis, available in 12 regional languages. A web platform will host Live Sessions in different regional languages as well as recorded sessions for self-paced learning in 6 languages (English, Hindi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada).
All participants will receive a certificate from UNICEF-YuWaah. Winners will be recognized by UNICEF on a national platform.
Speaking on the occasion, Anil Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education said, “This partnership withYuWaah is going to offer a unique learning experience for young people. TheYuWaah Echoes initiative will see participation from various institutions who will engage and encourage different skillsets, helping young people better prepare for their future career as well as their personal life.”
Dhuwarakha Sriram, Chief, ADAP & Generation Unlimited, UNICEF India said, “YuWaah Echoes is another step towards enabling and empowering India’s young people to take action against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in an interesting, self-learning and engaging format. Such a multi-activity event will provide a unique experience to encourage participants to hone their creativity, analytical and problem-solving skills by expressing, innovating, learning and taking charge – all skills that will prove useful for them to address challenges not just during the pandemic, but for rest of their lives.”
Earlier in May 2021, AICTE and UGC, along with UNICEF-YuWaah and 1350+ other collation partners hadlaunched the YoungWarrior movement, with the objective of enabling young people to take action against COVID-19 and cumulatively impact the lives of millions of people within their families and communities.
At the time of the launch, AICTE and UGC had initiated a clarion call to its colleges and institutions to encourage students and teachers to participate in the movement. The movement was received positively by young people across India, with more than 6.6 million actions taken by them and over 140,000 teachers and other stakeholders engaged during this period.