AI for Good Festival Returns to ITE College East With 5,000 Youth Target
Source: CNA
The inaugural AI for Good Festival is calling on Singapore's AI developers to help bridge the digital divide, targeting more than 5,000 youths through workshops and showcases. The second edition will be held at ITE College East next month.
The inaugural AI for Good Festival is calling on Singapore's AI developers to help bridge the digital divide, as the government pushes to ensure no one gets left behind in the city-state's rapid AI transformation. Organisers are targeting more than 5,000 youths through hands-on workshops, interactive showcases and community activities designed to make AI literacy accessible beyond the usual tech-savvy circles.
The festival, organised under the broader national push for inclusive AI adoption, encourages students who are already proficient in AI to develop solutions addressing real social challenges. The initiative reflects a growing recognition that Singapore's AI ambitions cannot be realised if large segments of the population remain disengaged from the technology reshaping their industries and daily lives.
The second edition of the event is scheduled to take place next month at ITE College East — a strategic venue choice that places the festival within one of Singapore's key institutions for hands-on technical and vocational education. The first edition demonstrated strong demand, with organisers now scaling up to accommodate more participants and a wider range of activities spanning coding workshops, AI ethics discussions and project showcases.
This push comes as Singapore deepens its national AI strategy under the newly formed National AI Council chaired by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong. While much of the public conversation around AI focuses on enterprise adoption, productivity gains and workforce disruption, the AI for Good Festival tackles a quieter but equally important question: how do you bring the broader public — especially young people outside the university pipeline — along for the ride?
Why it matters for Singapore: AI literacy is becoming as fundamental as digital literacy was a decade ago. By embedding AI education into a festival format that reaches students at ITE, the government is signalling that AI readiness isn't just for university graduates or tech workers. For a small nation that competes on human capital, leaving any cohort behind isn't just a social risk — it's an economic one. The festival's community-focused model offers a template for how other SG agencies might approach inclusive AI upskilling.