An Indonesian Startup ‘Bahaso’ Drew Attention in the ITU Telecom World 2019

Bahaso, an Indonesian startup that provides an application and website for learning foreign languages, was chosen to represent Indonesia to participate in the ITU Telecom World 2019 which took place in Budapest, Hungary. This event is an annual activity of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

ITU is a United Nations agency which is specialized in information and communication technology (ICT). Its goal is to encourage innovation in ICT with 193 member states and more than 700 private sector entities. The presence of Bahaso and its latest innovation has drawn the international’s attention.

This innovation is scheduled to be launched in March 2020. It has gained so much attention because the platform will be very useful in daily lives, especially for Muslims. This platform is supposed to help create young Muslim generations to love the Quran.

Allana Abdullah, the CEO of Bahaso, revealed that Bahaso’s presence in this forum is in line with its vision and mission to increase the contribution of digital literacy in the world of education for Indonesian people who live in the Frontier, Outermost, and Least Developed regions.

Many Countries Showed an Interest in Bahaso Program

“A lot of countries are showing an interest in this Bahaso program. One of them is a professor at one of the leading universities in central Europe. The same interest was also shown by talk show participants from Korea,” Allana said.

In his presentation in front of the ITU Telecom World 2019 participants, Allana introduced a one-stop-solution technology for Muslim Education Ecosystem which is practical and user-friendly. It was developed in collaboration with the largest Islamic institution in Indonesia, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU).

“Indonesia is known to have the largest Muslim population in the world. Through an exclusive MoU with Nahdlatul Ulama, we will work to create a new technology platform that is easily understood by anyone. Thus, the Muslim community in Indonesia can better understand Islam itself,” he said.

This collaboration with NU is the beginning of other large cooperation plans to support non-formal education and training in Indonesia, including education on religion. This application contains interesting learning contents and maintains the prevailing Islamic traditions with various features related to the lifestyle of a Muslim, from birth to death.

Allana Was Also Asked to Be a Panelist in the AI Discussion

Aside from explaining Bahaso and his work so far, Allana was also asked to be a panelist in the discussion of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The topic was ‘Diversity by design: mitigating gender bias in AI”. He also became a speaker at several meetings and received positive responses from the audiences.

Bahaso itself was born in 2015 to revolutionize ways to learn foreign languages. It was claimed to be more effective, efficient, and flexible. This educational technology application currently has more than 550,000 users and a variety of language courses including IELTS and TOEFL preparation.

Bahaso is also the largest online language education platform in Indonesia. This startup changed the way young people learn and adapt to globalization through E-learning technology. At the same time, it also shows the existence of Indonesian education technology towards digital inclusion.