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OLPC Fundraiser Outcomes

In December 2009 OLPC India run a fundraising event in Sydney. Janine Cahill, CEO Future Journeys, who was organising the event as one of the Directors of TiE Sydney has just received information about the school the funding is going to.

The name of this School is Kikarwali School (located about 32 miles on the main road from Sri  Ganga Nagar to Raisingh Nagar or 8 miles from Raisingh Nagar). There are 19 students in the 6th grade and 29 students in the 7th grade. They need 55 laptops including for the teachers and server plus solar panels. OLPC India is providing 40 laptops. Some of these are funded by TiE Sydney, some by Aastha Foundation and the rest by Satish Jha. OLPC India needs to raise the remaining funds to make it a successful project.

OLPC means One Laptop Per Child and is an initiative to provide the poorest children in the world with education. The project provides some of the most technologically advanced laptops with free open source software and teacher training for schools at the cheapest price – $300. It’s hard to believe that this includes training, rollout and the laptop, but it is true and successful. So far 2 million laptops have rolled out across South America, Asia and indigenous communities in Australia.

Now, someone might argue that we should be giving the poorest children food as they need it more than education. Of course we should give them the basic needs to survive. Nevertheless OLPC is a great initiative to give access to education which will ultimately help as those kids can use their education to improve life in their communities. OLPC therefore is a help to self help. Research shows the laptops increase attendance at school and kids stay in class longer. Educational outcomes are something like skills in 6 months is equivalent of 5 years of traditional schooling and kids love them! What a great way for the developing world to catch up on education, don’t you think?

OLPC India ran a fundraiser in December 2009 in Sydney in order to be able to provide this support in Indian schools. Satish Jha, head of OLPC India was speaking at the event and OLPC Australia provided some of the laptops to play with. The event was appropriately themed Bollywood, so it was a great evening with good food, good entertainment and inspiring speeches. There was also a lot of support from the Sydney community to donate prizes for a silent auction, for example Kim McGuiness from Network Central donated tickets for breakfast events and Ilka Brookes from Marziplanner generously donated her award-winning wedding planner software. The event raised A$10.000 which equals about 30 laptops that can now be provided to the Kikarwali School in India.

In March the OLPC India team will visit the school and report back on the outcomes.

posted 2 March 2010 @ 18:16 by Jana » 0 Comments

Previously Featured

FISH@6 going into 2010

In 2009 we re-branded the Foresight Innovation and Sustainability Hothouse into FISH@6 running every third Thursday throughout the year. We experimented a little with the format and length of the sessions and took on board some of the recommendations made by participants.
It was a successful year which established the FISH@6 workshops as a platform across [...]

1 February 2010 » read » One Comment