The Vodafone Foundation launches the Skills Upload Jr Challenge, where secondary school students must develop solutions to create an inclusive society

• Skills Upload Jr Challenge is a competition organized by the Vodafone Foundation with the aim of encouraging young people to get involved in changing communities by developing innovative solutions to reduce the digital divide and create a more technologically inclusive society.
• The competition is addressed to students and their teachers and will take place between October 2024 and April 2025, simultaneously in Romania and in eight other European countries: Albania, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands.
• In Romania, the competition is dedicated to secondary school students and teachers and is run in partnership with Junior Achievement Romania.

The Vodafone Foundation is launching the Skills Upload Jr Challenge international competition, through which students from nine European countries, including Romania, are encouraged to work in teams, alongside their teachers, and get involved in changing the communities they live in, through the use of digital tools.

The central theme is “Bridging the digital divide: Inclusion through digital technology” with a focus on generating solutions that address Sustainable Development Goals such as Quality Education (SDG 4) and Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11). The competition takes place between October 2024 and April 2025, simultaneously in Romania and in 8 other European countries: Albania, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands. The format of the competition involves the organization of national finals, as well as a European awards ceremony, which will take place in March 2024 in Bucharest and to which the winning teams from all participating countries will be invited.

In Romania, the competition is run in partnership with Junior Achievement (JA) Romania and is aimed at secondary school students and teachers in public schools. Participating teams will consist of 3-4 students from grades V – VIII and a coordinating teacher. Project ideas, included in the theme, can enter the competition between October 9 and November 8, 2024.

“We know that education and technology are the catalysts for change, and imagination and talent are everywhere. Every student can be an innovator waiting to be discovered. That is why we are happy to have the Skills Upload Jr Challenge competition in Romania and we encourage secondary school students and their teachers to enter with project ideas that can reduce the digital divide in the communities where they live. Together we can ensure that no one is left behind in the journey towards a digitized society”, said Angela Galeța, director of the Vodafone Foundation in Romania.

Students and teachers can deepen the field of technology, including topics related to artificial intelligence, as well as the topics from the subtopics of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), through the four modules recently launched by the Vodafone Foundation on the www.școaladinviitor.ro platform: Robotics, Digital Intelligence , Environment & ecology and Prepare for the future.

During the competition, the teams will benefit from training sessions and the use of the Brainstorming method to identify local problems and propose solutions using digital technology to solve them. This format reflects the effort of the Vodafone Foundation and JA Romania to encourage young people in Romania to become aware of existing inequalities and use technology to promote social inclusion and reduce the digital divide. During the competition, teams will be able to advance to successive stages based on criteria such as the originality and potential of the solution to respond to a local problem, the integration of digital technology in a sustainable, appropriate and realistic way in relation to the defined problem and the development of a prototype.

The five best teams will participate in the national final organized in February 2025 in Bucharest. Also in the Capital will be organized, in the spring of the following year, the European final of the competition. The winning team from Romania will have the opportunity to present their project in front of an international audience, interact with students from the other participating countries and learn how to tackle issues related to the digital divide in an international context.

Details about the competition, registration rules and conditions, can be found here https://jar.ro/competitie-skills-upload-jr-challenge

In the context of the recent report by the World Economic Forum, according to which 33% of the global population (2.6 billion people) is offline, the Skills Upload Jr Challenge is part of the Vodafone Foundation’s commitment to help fight the digital divide created by barriers to connectivity , such as: limited accessibility to data and devices, lack of necessary digital skills and lack of access to infrastructure and digital skills.

The Skills Upload Jr Challenge is part of the Skills Upload Jr programme, developed by the Vodafone Foundation. Since it was launched in 2021, 7.5 million students, 600,000 teachers and 8.2 million other people in Europe have benefited from the program’s activities. At the same time, Skills Upload Jr is part of the extended strategy of the Vodafone Foundation to promote inclusion through digital learning.

About the Vodafone Romania Foundation: For 25 years, we have been pooling our resources and those of our partners to build inclusive and sustainable projects together. We call on technology and social innovation and annually invest around 2 million euros in the development of disadvantaged communities in Romania. We modernize neonatal intensive care units and support digital education programs that prepare children and young people for the jobs of the future. Together with Vodafone’s other foundations around the world, we aim to improve the lives of 400 million people by 2025. We are a Romanian non-governmental organization established in 1998, with charitable status, distinct and independent from the commercial operations of Vodafone Romania.

More details about our programs can be found at http://jurnaldebine.fundatia-vodafone.ro/

Junior Achievement (JA) Romania, a non-profit organization, was founded in 1993 and is part of JA Worldwide® USA and JA Europe. Junior Achievement is the largest international organization of entrepreneurial, economic, financial, professional guidance and personal development education, its programs being followed in 40 countries in Europe and over 100 in the world. In 2024, the organization climbed into the Top 10 NGOs in the world for the sixth time and received its third nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Romania, JA applied learning programs are attended annually by over 292,000 pupils and students from 1,834 educational institutions and are carried out locally in partnership with the Ministry of Education, educational institutions and the business community.

More details are available at https://www.jaromania.org