ShareKUWAIT: During its annual Ramadan ghabqa, LOYAC honored three entrepreneurial projects that won the Najiba Al-Sayed Yaqoub Al-Rifai Award, which was launched this year to honor the winners of the “Kun-Tinyo” program for social entrepreneurship. Farea Al-Saqqaf, Chairman and Managing Director of LOYAC and LOYAC Art Academy (LAPA), commenced the ceremony with an opening speech in which she expressed her happiness on this occasion and introduced the winning projects.
“There is nothing more beloved to my heart than supporting and empowering young people to launch their own projects that will serve their communities,” Saqqaf said. “Tonight, we celebrate the honoring of three distinguished projects in the Kontinue program for community leadership. Each one carries an important humanitarian and societal issue, such as the issue of developing digital technical skills for autistic youth who are distinguished by their intelligence, which is an untapped project that won first place, then the Two Point OH project, which won second place for solutions to the problem of environmental pollution through a digital platform that connects individual consumers, companies and institutions with companies that recycle their waste or food banks.
Finally, a project that helps parents and the school monitor the health and safety of young students through a digital wristband,” Saqqaf said. Before the awards were distributed, a short documentary was shown that included the biography of the late Najiba Al-Rifai. Najiba Al-Sayyid Yaqoub Al-Sayed Youssef Al-Rifai was born in 1930 in the Sharq region of Kuwait. She joined the tribal school in 1938. In 1946, she married the late poet, writer and teacher Ahmed Muhammad Zain Al-Saqqaf, who in turn encouraged her to read and was keen to develop her abilities and skills, especially in the Arabic language and memorizing Arabic poetry, so she memorized thousands of poetic verses of Arab poets from pre-Islamic times until the modern era.
Najiba was passionate about science, so she joined the British Institute to learn English. She also loved volunteer work, so she was an active member of the Red Crescent Society, a member of the Association for the Disabled and the Women’s Cultural Association, and she was an advocate for women’s full political and social rights. She had an important influence and role in raising her daughter, Farea Al-Saqqaf, on principles and values adhering to women’s rights and pushing her towards volunteer work, as she accompanied her since she was a young woman to the activities of the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Society and involved her in them.
This was followed by the distribution of cash prizes to the winners to support their distinctive projects of community benefit, as the value of the prize for the first place winner was KD 1,500, for the second place KD 1,000 and for the third place KD 500.
