Maha Al-Otaibi, a Saudi student has won accolades for her country by winning second place in the Emirates Award for Arabian Gulf Youth for her waterproof hearing aid project which has received a seed funding of 70,000 dirhams from the Emirates Foundation.
The competition, an initiative of UAE-based Emirates Foundation and launched under the aegis of Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, UAE minister of foreign affairs and chairman of Emirates Foundation, is aimed at promoting social-enterprise projects by youngsters in the region.
Maytha Al-Habsi, chief programs officer at Emirates Foundation, said that the award unlocks the creativity of the Gulf region’s youth to solve social challenges through the creation of ideas for sustainable social enterprise while giving them the opportunity to be part of the largest initiative to create pilot social enterprises in the region.
Al-Otaibi expressed her happiness at receiving the award and said: “I am filled with pride and very happy at receiving this award.” Her project which employs nanotechnology to create waterproof hearing aids opens the way for people with hearing difficulties to maintain exercise routines, especially swimming without the fear of damage by water or salinity.
“My inspiration for the project came from my brother who suffers from hearing loss and always has trouble keeping his hearing aid from falling in the water,” says Al-Otaibi.
Al-Otaibi’s innovative hearing aid had earlier ranked sixth at the National Olympiad for Scientific Creativity (Ibdaa) in the Kingdom.
It was also awarded the silver medal at the 2014 Kuala Lumpur Innovation and Technology Exhibition (ITEX) and received congratulatory certificates from the King Abdul Aziz Foundation and the US-based University of Minnesota.
Al-Otaibi said that she is currently working on a new invention to help the visually challenged. “I believe that it is important to create something innovative for the growing number of blind people worldwide. I hope to find support for this project like I did for the previous one,” she said.
Elaborating on the importance of the award for GCC youth, Al-Habsi said: “The award offers young social entrepreneurs a unique opportunity to compete for an incubation grant to start up their social enterprise and gives the region’s youth a foundation to lead the next generation of venture philanthropists while investing strongly in the Gulf region’s future. It enables today’s youth to enhance their job prospects by stimulating their best ideas for the greater good of the community. Finally, the award acts as a catalyst to bring about social enterprise — the idea that social challenges can be overcome using a business-based approach — to the forefront of youth conversation.”
Student’s invention does KSA proud
