Over 600 young participants from 68 countries, Rwanda included, met in San José, Costa Rica from 9-11 September 2013 attending The International Telecommunication Union’s BYND2015 Global Youth Summit. Over 4000 others joined the discussion virtually from 50 hubs in 30 countries in self-organized workshops. This allowed a generation of 1000 unique ideas through crowdsourcing platforms. In this digital era where social media are revolutionizing things, tens of thousands of people joined the conversation via social media with a combined reach on Twitter alone of over 16 million. The online conversation took place in 74 languages, where education, health and access to ICTs ranked as the highest trending topics.

As the BYND2015 Global Youth Summit was taking place in Costa Rica, kLab in Kigali also hosted the ITU Kigali Hub discussion. Young people from Rwanda gathered at kLab to virtually take part to the summit with aim to influence the priorities of global leaders and decision-makers at the United Nations as they set the agenda for sustainable development beyond 2015 to build on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). 9th September was dubbed with the theme GET AHEAD, and this was the day that attracted the largest crowd and most vibrant discussion both in the gathering and on social media.

Young participants at BYND2015 Kigali Hub comprised of students, CEO’s and journalists as well as kLab tenants called on the government of Rwanda to boost private lead initiatives and broaden the space for innovation, employment as well as the market. They also emphasized that the big gap between skills acquired at graduation time and the skills needed in this competitive market is still large and hailed programs like kLab-University for trying to bridge this skills inefficiency.

As ideas were being shared by participants, others that couldn’t make it were able to join the discussion online with the hash-tags #BYND2015 #Rwanda and #ICT4D. As far as the Kigali Hub is concerned, the extended discussion sessions held at kLab were an eye opener to most participants, who as mentioned above are all trying to find their way towards a successful future for their startups’ ideas. Some of the main issues pointed out during these lightning discussions to mention a few were; poor research before building a solution, lack of business skills, lack of resources and tech skill-sets in general.

The end of the 3 days event was marked by sharing The BYND2015 Global Youth Declaration which shall be presented by Costa Rica President Laura Chinchilla at this year’s UN general assembly and she actually mentioned that it’s one of the best outcome documents she’s ever seen. To paraphrase the final paragraph of the summit declaration, this is not an outcome but rather a starting place for continued dialogue for young people to be included as full partners in the post-2015 global development process. So stayed tuned!