Joining Technovation Program

Technovation is a very great program for young women to create a mobile app that can solve real-world problems through technology and help other people to fill their needs. In Cambodia, there aren’t many women involved in the computer science field, yet. So the creators of Technovation want to make some changes and that’s why they create this program. In 2017, When I first heard of  Technovation and hearing that it is about creating an app that will help solve problems and learning how to code, I was very curious about what is coding basically and why do we need to learn about it. But after a period of time, I fully understood it and decided to join this program. First, we need to get into teams, brainstormed the problems in Cambodia that must be changed and came up with ideas to deal with those problems.

I was on a team called Green World and what we wanted to abolish to the Trash wasting. We realized that in the Capital of Cambodia, which is Phnom Penh, there is so many rubbish on the streets, near each house, next to the pagoda gate, along the riversides, etc and it really touches our heart and we think that this must be changed. However,  we want our environment to be clean and interactive with the tourists and visitors from other countries. After we got a theme for our app, we learned about how coding works and taking some business lessons to know the way that we can promote our app, so more people would want to use it. As a 12 years old girl, I didn’t really know much about the business field and how to apply it to the real world. It was really tough and complicated. But as I learned more and more about this, I found it really interesting and useful for my future career. We have created an app called Clean World. This application is used to educate the users about the effect of over-wasting trash, different types of rubbish bins, benefits of recycling those wastes and we also planned to include some games that relate to this topic. completing our application and submitted it to the regional Technovation ambassador, all of the teams would need to present their apps in the mini-pitch, which was when the judges scored our app based on our problem that we were trying to solve, the ideas that we came up with and the presentation that we’ve given to them. Our presentation was about the effects of Global warming, which parts of it are from the over-wasting materials, different types of rubbish bins and the features of our application that would help to reduce those huge amounts of trash. During the presentation, I saw the audience faces and their reaction and I felt like I already changed something. It seemed like they were blown away by how much trash they were wasting each day and what will those masses do to their future lives.

Sadly, we didn’t win this round, but still, my team tried our best and it was an excellent experience. I would highly suggest all young female Cambodians to try out this program because Technovation offers them the opportunities to learn and develop the requisite skills in technology to become adroit entrepreneurs and leaders of the future.