Bangladeshi start-ups working on opportunities for youths

Opportunities are aplenty, but not all youths are aware of their existence. In this backdrop, Youth Opportunities, a renowned international platform for finding global youth engagement scopes, strives to bridge this asymmetric status quo across the world. Based in Bangladesh, this platform collates important chances for self-development in form of education, international exposure, training and employment to youths all over the world. Recently, Youth Opportunities won the National Mobile Application Award from ICT division, Bangladesh government for its mobile application. They started their journey with a Facebook page in 2012. Now they have their own website which helped countless youths to excel their abilities around the world.
 To know about their journey, Nabila Anzum interviewed Makshudul  AM Manik and Osama Bin Noor, the co-founders of Youth Opportunities.  Below are the excerpts of the interview:
Question (Q): What inspired you to create such a platform?
Osama (O): After my graduation from a madrasha, a problem caught my attention. I noticed that many people were interested in continuing their studies abroad. But most of them were in a fix because they had lack of information about opportunities. Those who were aware used to keep the information secret so that others could not find out about it. This problems inspired me to create a platform where students can find all the information they needed.
Makshud (M): There are a lot of opportunities out there and even the people who stay in Dhaka are unaware about the opportunities. Looking at such scenario made me wonder about the condition of the people staying at villages and I always wanted to do something about this.
Q: What were the challenges you faced while building this platform?
M: We faced problems due to the limited resources we had. While setting up the website, we had to deal with people's personal interests rather than the vision of the platform. We also faced financial challenges as we wanted the service to be free for all.
O: Other than that, we also faced problems in finding good opportunities, because at the beginning our sources were limited. But over the years, we have got strong networks and linkages with institutions and partners. Just to add to Makshud, we are now working on to make this platform self-sustainable.
Q: Who were your strongest supporters throughout your entrepreneurial journey?
O: Fortunately, we have got a lot of well-wishers. Our families, friends and teachers helped us in every step. At initial stage our friends helped us and contributed without any cost. Initially, we provided the service through a Facebook page but then we felt the need of shifting from the Facebook page to a website. Ashraful Amin of Hootum, a creative agency and website development firm, helped us much to make our website of international standard.
One of the biggest motivations that we got is from the beneficiaries who have effectively turned opportunities into successes and Youth Opportunities helped them in the journey.
M: If you ask for a particular person, our biggest support was the support we gave each other as co-founders. Our government has been helpful in many instances.  We launched our mobile application on April 26 with the help of the ICT division.
Q:How did you build your sources of the youth opportunities?
O: We used to do a lot of volunteering works back then. The networking with different people gave us an idea about the different opportunities. So we shared those. Along with that, our friends--both inside and outside the country-- helped us by sharing the opportunities around them.
M: Over the years we have built a strong network of organisations who promote their programmes and opportunities with us. Now we have 100+ partners and we have also started to provide more services to them.
Q: What is the next milestone for Youth Opportunities?
M: Our existing platform mostly serves youths across the globe with opportunities that have global utilities. But there are many national opportunities that Bangladeshis are not aware of. Thus, we have already launched Youth Opportunities Bangladesh to provide both local and international opportunities that are pertaining to Bangladeshi youths. The purpose is to cater to the particular needs of the Bangladeshi youths.
O: Moreover, we are also working for ‘Youth Opportunities Indonesia’ which will be launched very soon. We want to make our website more useful for the youths of our country as much as it is helping the youths around the world. Youth Opportunities is now used free through free basics by Facebook in around 200 countries around the world.

The interviewer is a second year BBA student at East West University,  nabila.anzum17@gmail.com