Luminous Teen

Luminous Teen is a marketplace specially designed to accelerate early-age employability, with a vision to help eliminate Child Labor by 2025.

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Luminous Teen is intended to popularize self-paced Teen Employment and ensure a certain degree of Financial Independence for teenagers through paid work opportunities, multifaceted business initiatives, corporate connections & internships. We are in the process of building a Global Marketplace for Teenagers (and Youth (20-24) as well). The marketplace model is divided into three sections:

The Digital Platform, The Innovation Hub and The Localized Agencies

♦️The Digital Platform will integrate Freelancing opportunity for skilled teenagers and E-commerce opportunity for Teen Entrepreneurs. 

♦️The Innovation Hub is where teenagers will be able to collaborate, use necessary tools, receive instruction and invent new products and innovative services. The Innovation Hub will enable Luminous Teen to have its own products and maintain its uniqueness by showing quick response to the respective economy (and/or societal demands).

♦️The Localized Agencies are where Teenagers will be able to provide services on a local basis. These can include Retail, Publishing, Research, Advertising, Engineering and more (an example can be the Harvard Student Agencies). A Localized Agency is more focused on the neighbourhood and the skillset of local teenagers. It can be regarded as a tiny in-person version of the Digital Platform.

According to the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimation, approximately 5 million children in Bangladesh are full-time workers. UNICEF says, "Roughly 160 million children were subjected to child labor at the beginning of 2020, with 9 million additional children at risk due to the impact of COVID-19. This accounts for nearly 1 in 10 children worldwide." This is horrible!

Target 8.7 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals calls for an end to child labor in all its forms by 2025. In the 2017 World Report on Child Labour, ILO has identified six policy areas to respond to child labor, focusing on education and social protection for children while ensuring decent work opportunities for adults in their families.

However, ILO explicitly says on their website that simply maintaining the current rate of progress would leave 121 million children still engaged in child labor by the critical target year of 2025. It is a clear indication that we are missing a powerful armor in our battle against child labor.

Increasing economic inequality and lack of fruitful empowerment still prevail in Bangladeshi communities. The big number of Child Laborers signify that finance lies at the root of a vicious cycle of vulnerabilities in or outside the families. Again, due to the lack of proper incentives, teenagers are missing in the tremendous opportunity of growth through hands-on learning of the real world systems. This results in the uprising of mental health hazard cases around the country and the globe as well specially during the pandemic uncertainty. 

Lindsey Pollak, a New York Times bestselling author, is one of the many advocates of Teen Employment. She worked at a video store during her teenage years, and she believes that the rise in teen employment is beneficial for both the economy and future employers. According to research (Carr, Wright & Brody, 1996; McNeil, 1997; Mortimer & Finch, 1996), students who work less than 15 h/week generally have better educational outcomes than students who do not work at all. The U.S. Department of Labor says, "For every year a person works in their teens, their income raises 14-16 percent in their 20s."

Based on a study by UNCTAD, the relative prevalence of youth unemployment is evident particularly in the island LDCs (15.5 percent in 2012), Asian LDCs (10.5 percent), and African LDCs (9.6 percent). Clearly, early-age employability will significantly decrease the rate of youth unemployment.

In July 2019, the General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution declaring 2021 as the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour. At first, we will be working with skilled teenagers who can generate revenue. This unprecedented stream in most of the LDCs is supposed to help create a positive public psychology toward early-age employment that ensures the human rights. This will, in the rebounding effects, help make the transition of Child Laborers to Education-seeking youth involved in paid enrichment opportunities. Our impact-driven strategy will ensure that nobody is left behind and everyone receives necessary support from the global stakeholder network and related efforts. 

We investigated its demand with the help of a diverse group of global youth and got a very positive feedback. In the meantime, we have developed a rich database for our upcoming pilot program. We are now enrolled in Build for Earth, a unique acceleration program organized by the Hack for Earth Foundation based in Sweden. We are currently working on Clarifying the Concept, Prioritizing and Planning, Optimizing the Team, Business and Market, Understanding Human Behavior and the Psychology of Sustainability. 

From April, we will be working on Data Collection and Measuring the Impact, Financing, Organization Model, Autonomy and Resilience, Partnership and Sustainability. To know more, please visit: https://www.hackforearth.com/b...

The Founder, Md Jahirul Islam has worked with local faculty members, corporate and nonprofit leaders, experts and international diplomats. We have recently talked with a Cybersecurity Specialist and a Design Expert both based in the US for our post-pilot building activities through the engagement with potential users.

Luminous Teen was born through a Sociology Research carried out by Md Jahirul Islam in mid-2020. Exploring its feasibility was started in December 2020. We initially built a prototype of the Digital Platform. But it went invalid after subsequent development in the ideation and progress. The business model has been already studied. Now we are building a better prototype on the previous one and rolling up our sleeves to initiate the pilot program after mid-February 2022.

Our Digital Platform is supposed to rely on Web Technology, Blockchain for Information Security, Artificial Intelligence for User Experience. We hope to launch its application software version as well.

The Innovation Hub will be a plethora of technology, which may include Drones, Robotics, Internet of Things and so on.

The Localized Agencies will also need to use fundamental technological tools to run smoothly. 

We have not yet launched our solution. 

We hope to create our Minimum Viable Product by October 2022. It will then go through another phase of testing and modification. We plan to launch right at the beginning of 2023 and simultaneously involve teenagers from South Asia and Africa first. We hope to affect at least 10,000 teenagers during the year.

This target can be reached faster provided everything remains in our favor.

Help teenagers generate a total revenue of minimum $250,000 in the year of 2023

Create 1 Million globally accessible opportunities for teenagers to generate revenue in the year of 2023

Help minimum 10,000 Child Laborers overcome poverty and be back to school, while having vocational training 

Work with the Government and respective stakeholders to nationally celebrate the first massive summer internship opportunity for high-schoolers in Bangladesh (and if possible, another South Asian country) 

Arrange the first-ever Teen Fair in Bangladesh and establish minimum 50 Localised Agencies all around Bangladesh 

Work with Financial Institutions (especially Grameen Bank) to replicate the concept of microloan for teenagers and/or bring financial inclusion of teenagers to high-school level

The website (or application software) transaction system will track the total amount of revenue teenagers using the Digital Platform generate

Number of accessible Opportunities created in order to help generate revenue 

Number of teenagers helped; number of Child Laborers with improved living condition

And so on; We will be working more on this after being done with our Pilot Program. One of our potential stakeholder company based in Sweden has helped us identify our primary sponsors in this study.

Financial: Equity-free grants as primary investment might be helpful

Technical: Building the massive web infrastructure, ensuring security, data protection and substantial safeguarding will be notable challenges 

Cultural: Developing a positive mass psychology toward teen employment and establishing the view that people can buy from teenagers might take some time

Market: Teenagers are supposed to have competitive advantage in certain industries. Luminous Teen's R&D team is working on ensuring the market-fit. During the fast-evolving market reality amidst the pandemic, it may be tough to boldly challenge the status quo and rapidly securing a financially solid base.

Md Jahirul Islam, a high-school senior based in Bangladesh, has shown consistent excellence during his years in high-school. He is an 'Excellent' Awardee (Gold-medal equivalent) in the International Earth Science Olympiad 2021. His academic excellence accompanied by his accomplishments in ECA has helped him achieve a warm acceptance to wherever he has been. This has enabled him to explore more, question the existing system and dream of a change. Being a teenager, he was inspired to continue with Luminous Teen after he had to withdraw his application from a prestigious summer program due to the lack of adequate financial flexibility.

Raheeb Sadman is another high-school senior based in Bangladesh who does more than he says. This youngster has been the Founder President of a prestigious Information Technology institutional club in Dhaka. Under his leadership, the club achieved massive growth and mobilized thousands of local students. This has been covered by several reputed newspapers in Bangladesh. Besides, he was a finalist in the #beapirate Challenge 2021. He is now serving as the editorial panel of a reputed institutional magazine and a significant addition to the school spirit at St. Joseph Higher Secondary School, Dhaka.

Arif Ahmed is a professional business mentor & coach who has already worked with businesses from 20+ countries. Starting his own career at the age of 12 under his father's careful supervision, Arif remains a lifelong advocate for youth empowerment. He has already launched an EdTech in Bangladesh and worked with global leaders in the field of Artificial Intelligence. 

Until January 26, we are reaching out to our potential stakeholders as we are taking a step back to clarify the concept with Build for Earth.

After that, we will Prioritize the Plan and start working with partners. Hack for Earth has a remarkable partner network of 32 partners. Among them, we are focusing on -

UNICEF, UNLEASH and SDSN Youth: Our work will be an amazing complement to that of UNICEF. UNICEF Dubai has been a part of our Hack for Earth journey. UNLEASH and SDSN Youth can help us in scaling up our impact with their connections, outreach and resources through the United Nations network.

Ambitious Africa and Let's Do It World can help us readily implement our solution. They can be our oversea partners to work from the community level to the national stage. 

Amazon Web Service and ChromaWay can be our potential source of Technology support. 

Not Applicable

As a for-youth-by-youth initiative based in Bangladesh, Luminous Teen has always prioritized SDG 5: Gender Equality in all its works. Traditionally, women and girls have faced more adversities and through our venture, we will be working to reduce the gap by introducing different competitive advantages for girls. We are supposed to meet Senjuti Saha (a world-renowned female scientist from Bangladesh, working on Woman Rights) to discuss more about it. We have built a specific roadmap to work with Shomy Hasan, a Diana Legacy Award Judge from Bangladesh and a UNDP Youth Delegate from Lebanon in reaching our goals.

A huge number of rural girls are still facing the terrible realities of child marriage and drop-out of school. The Pozen Social Innovation Prize will increase our capacity to meaningfully integrate this issue to our mission and find sustainable solutions, as girls already occupy a significant position in our target audience.