Youth are the future leaders of a country. A country’s future entirely depends on how the young souls are trained and fostered. There is no alternative to boot camps that play a vital role in grooming the youths. Keeping this in mind, every year Preneur Lab Youth and Innovation Trust and Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom Bangladesh organize Freedom Fellows programs. This year the program was also arranged in two different cohorts whose final graduation day was held on 25 May 2022. The candidates were from the Freedom Fellows Cohort 4 and Cohort 5 programs who received their graduation from the camp on that day.
The virtual session for the graduation ceremony started just at 8:00 pm. Mr. Arif Nezami, Co-founder of Preneur Lab Youth and Innovation Trust; Ms. Rakhshanda Rukham, Co-founder of Preneur Lab Youth and Innovation Trust and Mr. Omar Mostafiz, Program Manager of FNF Bangladesh were present in the program. Mr. Wolfgang Heinz, Country Director, Germany & Bangladesh of Friedrich Naumann Foundation, and Dr. Najmul Hossain, Country Representative of FNF Bangladesh were the special guests of the program. They all attended the program and kept their valuable speeches before the participants which motivated them a lot.
About 300 young minds registered themselves for the cohorts and finally, around 35 for each of the cohorts were selected. This year the Freedom Fellows program for cohort 4 started on 21st March and for cohort 5, it started on 22 March. There were 6 sessions conducted by different renowned and resourceful speakers such as Mr. Lawrence Reed, president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education; Imran Ali Sagor, IT Consultant; Hasan Benaul Islam, Industry Promotion Specialist, ICT Division, etc. As a result, the sessions were both entertaining and educational, with plenty of materials and real-life examples.
The participants were given the task of content creation as their final assignment. More than 40 candidates submitted the assignment and were selected for graduation. Each of the cohorts was divided into some groups according to different topics and a mentor was assigned for each of the groups. According to the content quality a winner was selected from each of the groups. Finally, the unveiling of the certificates was held with the graduates’ names and some exciting gifts and were arranged for all the graduates as well as some special gift items for the winners.
The program had a significant impact on the graduates, who expressed a desire to participate in such programs in the future. Preneur Lab and FNF Bangladesh are also hopeful to organize these kinds of workshops more and more in the future.