Zachary Luke Sub­ran-Ganesh, 16, earned third place at a re­gion­al es­say com­pe­ti­tion host­ed by the Caribbean As­so­ci­a­tion of Na­tion­al Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Or­gan­i­sa­tions (Can­to). The com­pe­ti­tion chal­lenged young peo­ple to share their views on "Women and Girls in ICTs." Sub­ran-Ganesh is no stranger to in­ter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion, hav­ing rep­re­sent­ed Trinidad and To­ba­go at the In­ter­na­tion­al Olympiad in In­for­mat­ics in Cana­da last year.

The Can­to es­say chal­lenge was an­swered by scores of stu­dents from An­tigua, Be­lize, The Ba­hamas, Do­mini­ca, Guyana, St Kitts & Nevis, St Vin­cent & the Grenadines, Ja­maica, St Maarten, Suri­name and Trinidad and To­ba­go. This was Sub­ran-Ganesh's first time at­tempt­ing the an­nu­al com­pe­ti­tion but he was dri­ven.

"I was re­al­ly in­ter­est­ed in this year's top­ic," he said, adding that his re­search helped him bet­ter un­der­stand why women were so un­der-rep­re­sent­ed in the in­dus­try and what could be done to at­tract them to stud­ies in ICT (in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy).

En­tries for the es­say com­pe­ti­tion were judged by a pan­el of ex­perts in the fields of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and ed­u­ca­tion and were scored for cre­ativ­i­ty, or­gan­i­sa­tion, me­chan­ics and ed­u­ca­tion­al/tech­ni­cal mer­it. For his ef­forts, Sub­ran-Ganesh won the blink/bmo­bile-spon­sored prize of US$250 and aBlu Stu­dio5.3 smart­phone.

Blink/bmo­bile has spon­sored T&T prizewin­ners of the com­pe­ti­tion for a num­ber of years and Nare­sha Ali-Bel­monte, man­ag­er for mo­bile mar­ket­ing, praised Sub­ran-Ganesh on his in­sight­ful es­say. "We be­lieve that en­cour­ag­ing young peo­ple to se­ri­ous­ly look at the role ICT plays in pos­i­tive­ly im­pact­ing the so­ci­ety is one way of get­ting more peo­ple to see it as a change agent," Ali-Bel­monte said.