InnoYOUTH (Innovative Youth) : Empowering Kajang Prison Inmates (Youths) in Digital Micro-Enterprises is a social project to empower 350 inmates of Kajang Prison inmates in multimedia and desktop publishing skills as to enable them to become micro-entrepreneurs once they are released. This project is supported by Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation Malaysia under the community of Inno Youth Scheme. The project aims to give guidance, hope, skills and confidence for the inmates to start afresh a new lease of life –in other words, using ICT skills to earn a living! InnoYouth project will provide hope and instill sense of self-respect for the inmates and help to reduce ‘re-offending’ cases.

ICT will be used as a creative tool to prepare, train and enhance the target group’s ability to offer niche services in multimedia and desktop publishing. Upon completing their detention period, the inmates – who may call themselves as ‘InnoYouth Micro-Entrepreneur’ - will be able to offer the following services :-

• Desktop Publishing • Digital Photography • Digital Videography • TeleCenter Services

InnoYouth will be a creative ICT project in this country – offering a unique ICT training package for these unfortunate inmates (prisoners). If proven successful, the project may be replicated to other prison institutions throughout Malaysia. Prihatin Malaysia strongly believe in providing relevant content for target participants – by doing so, the probability of these prisoners to re-offend could be reduced drastically.

We have also demonstrated how ICT could be used creatively to market rural products such as ‘keropok’ and ‘handicrafts’ to hypermarkets via online tools (more information is available at www.banghuris.net).