Empowering Laos’ Youth: How AI and Tradition Spark a Greener Future
Empowering Laos’ Youth: How AI and Tradition Spark a Greener Future
“I just know that AI can enhance our ideas for the project,” said Panee Xong one of the young participants from UPSHIFT Luang Prabang, reflecting the growing excitement and confidence among youth engaged in this program.
In 2025, the second UPSHIFT initiative took place in Luang Prabang where young people facing with leaving their communities for better opportunities. UPSHIFT aims to reverse this trend by equipping youth with the skills, knowledge, and inspiration to become changemakers in their own communities.
Among the six teams selected in Luang Prabang, the ‘Better Life’ team stood out with their project to support local bee populations through the creation of “fake bee houses” to provide safe spaces for solitary bees, help strengthen local biodiversity, and contribute to restoring bee populations as their natural habitats continue to disappear due to human activities.
The training showed us how to use AI in prototyping our ideas. AI helped us design better bee houses tailored to what bees need. It also helped us find the best materials to use, materials that are sustainable and affordable for our community. AI turned our ideas into something practical and ready to be built.
Before in person training, the youth immersed themselves in intensive preparatory work, applying design-thinking tools such as problem trees, 5 Whys, stakeholder mapping, and conducting interviews with community members to uncover the root causes of local environmental challenges. These steps helped the team build a deep understanding of the issues and shape their approach to designing meaningful solutions.
When we spoke with farmers and local people, they told us how important bees are for their crops and how the bee population is disappearing. This made us realize that our idea wasn’t just a project, it was a real solution that could help protect their livelihoods.
"Before AI, we didn’t know how to visualize our ideas or check if they would work. Now, we can create digital prototypes and improve them before making a physical model. It saves time and helps us be more confident.” – Said Phoutthavong, a member of Better Life
It is a movement nurturing young leaders and changemakers. As these we are embrace AI to support young people’s ideas, alongside providing the digital literacy for them to understand the pros and cons of it, young people now can protect their environment and uplift their communities.
Through a Project Sinxay: UPSHIFT with support from Arm, this is not just community projects but hope that can lead the way toward a greener, fairer, and more sustainable Laos.
