As a way of trying to raise awareness about the various charitable organisations in Oman and provide entertainment at the same time, a group of organisers from the Modern College of Business and Science have arranged the third Annual Youth Festival scheduled for March 12-14. The festival is open to all and the organisers have invited numerous underprivileged groups from society to attend the event as honourable guests.

This year, the festival organisers claim it will be bigger than the previous two events and feature a variety of new attractions to help keep visitors entertained. These new additions include a Global Village as well as a Ladies Tent that has been specially introduced for female visitors.

Rahma Salim, one of the organisers, said, “What’s different this time is that the festival doesn’t solely revolve around entertainment. It’s more educational and focused more on raising awareness, which makes it suitable for all ages and everyone will find something that they enjoy doing. For example, families can come and stay for a couple of performances, look around the stalls and the Heritage Village before relaxing at the food court.” Other events that will be running throughout the three days are a career fair and car show.

The festival will be held at the Modern College of Business and Science in Bausher and run from 4pm till 9pm on all three days. There are ten people organising the event and while Rahma said not all of the college’s students are involved in the organisation side of things, many are volunteering to help out the individual organisers in planning their sections. Many others have also helped by way of suggesting ideas or recommending contacts that might be able to help make it a successful event.

On what the students gain from this experience, Rahma said, “We learn so much from organising an event as big as this and the experience we gain is very rewarding. For example, our communication skills improve because we have to go to lots of meetings and approach people differently depending on our objective. This really gives us a whole new perspective on how things are like after college.”

She continued that it is also provides them with important lessons such as how to manage time effectively as all of the students have to organise the event alongside their normal studies. For Rahma, she found that it helped many of the organisers discover leadership potential that they never knew they had before as well as encouraging others to participate in anyway they could.

Rahma said that she and the other organisers hope to see people of all ages, backgrounds and interests attend the event over the three days it will be running and help the team achieve what it has set out to do.