 It's a pleasure to be here today. I flew all the way from the island of Angola, a very beautiful island in the Caribbean to speak to you about youth development and wordpress. So what is, what are youths? What is the definition of youth? Now the United Nations has a definition of youth as persons from the age of 15 to 24. Whereas the international youth business foundation, they, they sorry, the youth business international recognizes youth as persons age 18 to 35, which I prefer as a definition because as a 27 year old, I still think I'm a youth. And I'm so many of you in here still, you know, your definition might be a little different than that as well. So what is youth business development? Youth business development is removing the barriers from for entry for young persons so that they can become entrepreneurs. On that basis, we want them to be able to create businesses that can be profitable, that can be scalable, and that can also imply other young persons. Now what is wordpress? Wordpress is an open-source content management system that allows persons to build websites. It also assists them to make their dreams come true. And it is also a tool that is used to remove barriers. So I like to see a correlation between youth development and wordpress on the basis of the freedom to create and also to remove barriers. So who am I? I had a lovely introduction earlier, but I have two businesses. The first I inherited from my father, which is a publication, a tourism publication for my island, and I took that over in 2015 after he ran it for 25 years. And what I did with that along with my siblings was to develop a marketing company. And we have delved into wordpress because we have our own web website, which hosts our our magazine. And I really came about because a friend of mine who knew how to create wordpress sites just through tinkering, just through learning, like many of us here may have done, he introduced it to me and said, you know what? I think that you need a website. I think you need to have the magazine online and so forth. And then from there, I added more things and then I met another young man. He said that your website could be a little better. I think you need to add this and this. And from there, he assisted me to develop the website to what it is today, which offers e-commerce solutions and also has a magazine online. And we do a lot of content generation and so forth. But I'm also the chairman of the Angled Youth Business Foundation, which is there to remove the barriers of entry for young persons into business, which this talk is about. But I would like for us to really look at the barriers of entry for young persons in business from the perspective of wordpress. Now as it relates to wordpress and having websites in general, for persons in my community, it almost seems like a distant dream. One of the main reasons for that is because there is no way or there were difficult ways of getting it to be monetized. Because at the end of the day, you still want to be able to make something out of the website that you have. Otherwise, it's just there for awareness and engagement. So a little bit more about my island. It's located next to St. Martin. Most people know St. Martin. You can fly. You can fly into Angola from Miami as well. We have 15,000 people and it's a British overseas territory. Continuing. So removing barriers with wordpress. Wordpress has is democratized publishing. The freedom to build, the freedom to change, the freedom to share. And the key benefits of wordpress is you can install and set up with no HTML coding, which I didn't really have any knowledge of. It's cost-effective because it's literally free because it's open source. It's SEO friendly, mobile responsive, which in today's world we are all mobile users. Everyone has a mobile phone. It's globally accessible. There are over 54,000 plugins that can do anything your heart desires and you can even make it into what your heart desires as well, even if it's not necessarily built for that. And also the ability to create blogs. Now removing barriers to entry for youth in business. With the Angola Youth Business Foundation, there are three core things that we want to remove. The barrier to entry for training of young persons in business. Removing the issue of having mentors to teach you how to have their own business and also access to financing. So as relates to wordpress, wordpress addresses some of these things because there's a community like this that allows you to have mentorship. So that's a very important part of it. It's free and for young people who don't really have any access to income. They don't make any money. It's important to allow you to go on and tinker much like myself when I started and learn about the ability to have a website and also financing. I did mention that and it's free. Many of the plugins. There are free versions. There are premium versions and you can walk your way up until the point that you can actually pay for wordpress and all the great features that there are. However, in smaller countries like my own we face different kinds of barriers to entry than most people in bigger countries because there are very fundamental features that we wouldn't pay any importance to because when you're born here or you grow up here you can start a website tomorrow and probably start making money directly from that website because you know the banks and all those other financial institutions have relationships with the plugins and with developers and so forth to make it a reality. Whereas from my experience, I had about five to six years just trying to find a way to make money on my website. I tried PayPal. I tried other options but because the financial institutions in my country did not have that relationship it was very difficult for me to do so but I had big dreams. I had lots of big dreams for that website and so as a content creator and as someone who's an entrepreneur who has all these dreams and stuff it was it was daunting and it could even make you want to give up. So wordpress and youth development. Wordpress is built around the same objectives of institutions that promote youth business development removing barriers through training mentorship and capital. So with wordpress youth can learn by doing they own their own content they have a safe environment especially as it's youth you know we want to ensure that their data is safe, there's privacy and you know that they have an environment that they won't suffer from bullying and all of these issues that we see around the world. They can share all of the content that they have photos, videos, long and short texts and they can be paid for their content, they can sell merchandise and they can create a business, our career. Now as it relates to sharing all kinds of content, yes there's social media, we have TikTok, we have Facebook, Instagram, you name it there's a wide array of platforms where you can share content but is that content really your own? That is a question are the people that you're engaging with really your own and that is one of the things that wordpress allows people to have. It allows them to have ownership of their audience and ownership of their content whether it's posted on YouTube they can always embed it on their website or they can also post it on their website as well that same content and that is a very important part of wordpress. So who are the next generation of content creators? The content creation industry is now estimated to be worth more than 400 billion dollars according to a 2021 article published by Content Hacker. The next generation of content creators are skilled in using their smartphones, in creating viral content from those using those same smartphones. They're marketing gurus at what they do for the products that they endorse and even the products that they own and for other examples of this include bloggers, online publishers, newsletter artists, podcasters, YouTubers, course creators and so much more. There are also new technologies that are on the rise. Many of us have heard about blockchain and NFTs and for many that is still a daunting area to really delve into but wordpress has solutions for that and it is providing the opportunity as I said for us to own our content. So like I said earlier wordpress has plugins that can make all your dreams come true and if it's not there yet it can be developed and the the plugins that are there are also so versatile that you can you know manipulate them to the direction that you find is best for you. So like I said my personal experiences with wordpress I had a dream of I'm having a publication online a friend helped me to create my first website then another friend came in and helped me to build that website more and and then I added more plugins and I learned by doing and I read and I went on YouTube by engaged with the community as well and that has really boosted me to become the person I am today and to be standing here as well. So like I learned how to do SEO, we had a blog as well and all of this added to the wealth and the functionality of that website but like I said we are missing the ability to accept payments. So into today well within the past nine months we we got that ability and that was very a very exciting time for me and I would say that the way that that accord was just because one developer one local developer found a way to to work with a financial institution locally to create a plugin that could work between my website and the financial institution and I was able to to make money through that and so today now I have two businesses the other one is a two operator and we allow people to pay us online and that might sound very it's a small thing it's a drop in the bucket it's a regular thing for everyone else but for developing countries there are a lot of things a lot of potential and and growth that is there but you know we need the connections we need persons who know how to develop we need access and that's what WordPress is about. So I mentioned monetizing so using ad words using online taking sales online stores native that native advertising all these things are very common to everyone here but it's not necessarily common for us so barriers faced by small countries for small developing countries other barriers would be internet speeds you know whenever we get a slow internet speed that is something that really frustrates us I'm very sure of that and especially if your content creator who has to upload big videos hd videos and photos and so forth it's very daunting and it causes you to move away from those directions those barriers cause you from really expanding on those opportunities that you have available to you and then so within my country with COVID-19 because you couldn't go anywhere they really opted now to try and get everything online so e-payments and so forth and these are things that are very common everywhere so you know where we're getting into the groove of it we're removing those barriers and things are happening so in conclusion WordPress is a very powerful tool it provides young business persons opportunity to really realize their dreams and to grow businesses and have the potential to make money from them youth business development is centered around removing those barriers and WordPress is equally the same it removes barriers and it provides a freedom to realize the dreams that you have some youth especially those in small developing countries may not be able to really go into the directions of what we would think of the next generation of WordPress WordPress persons would be going into content creators would be going into however that is a new direction for them whereas in countries like america and those other larger countries that's that's not the case so my final point the future of content creators is WordPress where youth can own their content and create profitable businesses thank you very much for your time and it's a pleasure being here