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A major focus of our global programs is about providing individuals around the world with access to information and communications technology (ICT) – what some still call digital inclusion or “closing the digital divide.” We aren’t a hardware infrastructure provider, so achieving the goal of increasing access requires deep partnerships. It goes beyond the nuts and bolts (or wires and airwaves) to skills, content and context. This becomes critically important in our work in communities around the world outside of the area of formal education - where we are also highlighting a large number of commitments at the Clinton Global Initiative this week.
For our community programs the objective of serving the “underserved” takes a multitude of forms, many of which I have witnessed firsthand in my travels and learned from talking to individuals who went from fearful to confident based on their participation in the programs we support through our community partners. ICT has opened doors for them in ways that are as diverse as the communities in which they live. There are two programs I would like to focus on that show different perspectives of the skills, content and context components, both of which will have a spotlight on them during this hectic week in New York.
Community Technology Access
One of our CGI commitments, made in 2008, is the Community Technology Access (CTA) program. Working with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), this program is increasing access to technology in the most challenging of settings – refugee camps. This is a CONTEXT that unfortunately too many people experience (over 40 million right now) but one that the vast majority of us on the planet have no concept of. The camps are remote with intermittent on non-existent infrastructure and connectivity. The camps frame the world view of their residents not just for a few weeks, but often for years or decades – in fact 15 years on average. Children may grow to adulthood in a camp knowing very little of the world outside.
The fundamental goal of CTA is to give people the SKILLS and CONTENT needed to pursue opportunities inside and outside the camp, whether it is education, entrepreneurship, communication or otherwise. The key technology innovation of the CTA program is standardized solar-powered computer classrooms and labs with the capability of handling the rugged conditions of the camps. To date, CTA sights have been opened in Rwanda and Bangladesh, with 26 additional locations planned through 2010.
Women in Technology
We’re celebrating another program this week: the Women In Technology (WIT) initiative. In fact, Microsoft is being honored by the Institute of International Education (IIE) for our contribution to WIT at their gala event. The real honor goes, of course, to the local organizations and program participants in nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. I have had the privilege of seeing WIT programs first hand in the UAE and Saudi Arabia and have been consistently impressed with how these women are driving change. They believe in the power of technology and understand how it can fundamentally change their ability to become meaningful contributors in their society at a large scale. This week I was fortunate to have the opportunities to meet three participants in the program here in New York and came away with a similar sense of optimism –the future is safe in the hands of these very young yet powerful women.
Their experience reflects that of nearly 10,000 other women from societies where women struggle for equality at many levels. The particular focus of WIT is to provide the SKILLS needed in the job market and to support women entrepreneurs – and the key to success has been working through more than 60 local organizations to ensure that both the CONTENT and CONTEXT are appropriate across a very diverse region. In addition to its impact, the program illustrates a public-private partnership between Microsoft, IIE and the Middle East Partnership Initiative to leverage resources, knowledge and opportunities for WIT success.
I want to close by saying that both of these programs represent one of our fundamental principles – stay local. I don’t mean to say there aren’t best practices that apply broadly or opportunities for scale at the regional or global level, but you will never be successful if programs aren’t appropriate for the specific community. Through our staff and partners around the world we are able to identify and support programs that remain true to this principle.
Front row: Najla Abou Hamzeh (Lebanon), Khadija Ait Kaddour (Morocco), Salma Yassin, (Interpreter), Rana Hadi (Iraq).
Back row: Akhtar Badshah (Microsoft), Karin Eisele, (Executive Director, IIE West Coast), Peggy Blumenthal (COO and Executive Vice President, IIE), Pamela Passman (Microsoft), Zaki Khoury (Microsoft), Heather Ramsey (Director, Women in Technology & Global Partnerships, IIE) Kit Bartels (U.S. Department of State, Middle East Partnership Initiative).
Photo courtesy of Lyn Hughes for the Institute of International Education
Beverly Schwartz, Vice-President of Global Marketing at Ashoka.
Each year at this time, world leaders from every sector—private, nongovernmental, academic, and everywhere in between—convene in New York City at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting. Former President Bill Clinton’s initial concept for the meeting is actually quite simple: bring together a diverse group of individuals dedicat ed to realizing positive, lasting change, and provide them with the enabling environment and inspiration to work together to turn their ideas into action. In short, the meeting is a time not only to develop a shared vision of the future, but also create tangible, measurable, and sustainable plans of action toward achieving that vision.
This year CGI invited us and Microsoft to develop and facilitate a pre-meeting workshop that would help non-profit, citizen sector leaders attending CGI make the most of the experience, leverage the participant network, and accelerate skills and knowledge. For the second straight year we were pleased to be partnering with Microsoft to present this session. Today, each participant was able to identify and articulate a unique value proposition that projects their organizational missions into the future, and think through ways in which information technology can help accelerate their vision and bringing to life their current and future value to other CGI members.
Additionally, this year four senior staff members of Ashoka will also be playing a mentorship role for all nonprofit leaders to help them work through their organizations’ strategic objectives and needs, as well as identify new connections and partnership opportunities during the course of the meeting. By working individually with these leaders, we can ensure that they make the most of their CGI experience. Our goal is to help participants seed innovative partnerships, develop new plans of action, leverage their impact, and enable everyone to fulfill their objectives for the meeting.
We know from experience that the value of these services is profound. Coming out of last year’s Annual Meeting, for example, Microsoft worked with Ashoka Fellow Hilmi Quraishi. This is just one of countless illustrations of the power of the CGI network to identify and instigate collaborations which advance worldwide innovative solutions and the type of partnerships Ashoka’s mentors will be helping nonprofit CGI members to create.
Microsoft is a critical partner in bringing to life this significant mentorship program, and we look forward to sharing numerous stories of change throughout the course of the CGI Annual Meeting and beyond. Stay tuned, and please join in the conversation!
Ashoka is the world’s leading community of social entrepreneurs and is actively building infrastructure for an “Everyone A Changemaker” world.
Founded in 2005 by President Clinton, the Clinton Global Initiative was created to turn ideas into action creating a more integrated global community with shared benefits, responsibilities, and values. It brings together people from around the world, and channels the capacities of individuals and organizations to realize social and economic change. It focuses on practical solutions to global issues through the development of specific and measurable Commitments to Action.
Microsoft is a proud partner of the Clinton Global Initiative. We share the same belief that collaboration between individuals and the private, public and nonprofit sectors can address the world's most pressing problems.
This week, the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting takes place in New York from September 20-23 and we plan to share stories throughout the week that illustrate how our CGI Commitments to Action are having a positive impact addressing education, social and economic issues.
To mark this year’s event you can find a wealth of resources on the Microsoft Citizenship website.
Each day we’ll be bringing a different story or initiative to life with content, videos and photography, as well as a daily post on the Microsoft Unlimited Potential blog.
If you’re not in New York this week but are interested in following the proceedings, why not visit the CGI website where the events will be streamed live through your web browser.
It’s back-to-school this month for nearly 56 million K-12 students in the U.S. Many will participate in afterschool programs that offer supervised activities for children of working parents or caregivers and providing developmental opportunities to urban and rural youth. Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) is a great example. Their Club Tech afterschool technology program is now in its tenth year and recent studies by the University of Washington and others indicate that the program has positively impacted youth served by promoting learning and helping to retain and increase membership.
To celebrate the success of Club Tech, BGCA and Microsoft – a founding sponsor - are refreshing the model in selected sites to encourage further innovation and replication. With additional support from new partners, Comcast and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, BGCA has recently launched five sites known as Centers of Excellence to create a vibrant look and feel and update the technology and curriculum.
The first Center opened in May at the historic Dunlevy Milbank Club in Harlem, where Bill Gates and then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton first launched Club Tech 10 years ago. The Harlem event was followed by four other openings during the summer in Chicago, Washington, DC and Puget Sound. This fall five more Centers are planned in cities across the East, Midwest and West region, including Atlanta not far from the BGCA national headquarters.
Photo Courtesy of http://www.nityiadesign.com
Grand Openings last month at the Bellevue BGC and the Smilow Clubhouse at Rainier Vista attracted enthusiastic audiences of Club members and friends. Robbie Bach, Microsoft executive, and chairperson of the national BGCA Board of Governors, and longtime Bellevue Boys & Girls Club board member, was a keynote speaker for their opening, along with Jon Roskill, Microsoft executive and Boys & Girls Club of King County board member. Roskill also spoke during the events at Smilow Clubhouse and in Harlem noting that “today’s kids are using technology in new ways not dreamed of even 10 years ago when we first launched Club Tech.”
To meet that challenge, the goal of Club Tech is to empower young people to do well in school and to prepare them for success in a 21st century workforce. Thus, the Centers provide kids with state-of-the-art Microsoft software and new hardware in a dedicated space to foster creativity and teamwork along with cutting edge training and education for Club Tech Staff. Instruction in areas such as creating a resume, designing websites and restoring computers will be combined with activities to develop critical thinking, project management and problem-solving skills.
Each Center of Excellence includes designated, specially designed instructional and exploratory zones:
During the past decade, more than 3,600 Club Tech locations have opened in the U.S. and on military bases worldwide, serving close to 1 million kids each year. These Centers of Excellence are intended to have a positive impact on the next generation of youth as they develop skills and confidence about their future outlook.
Not long ago, we introduced you to the Nonprofit IT Pyramid – a simple framework we use to (1) help us understand how nonprofits adopt technology, and (2) guide our own programs to ensure they are well-aligned with the needs of nonprofits. Over the last few weeks, we’ve taken a closer look at examples of nonprofits using IT at each level, but we aren’t done yet! After years of teaching nonprofits strategic technology planning, I have found that the Nonprofit IT Pyramid doesn’t fully “click” until we follow one organization’s experience from the bottom to the top of the pyramid (or from the transactional to the transformational use of IT, as Akhtar recently put it). Seeing how it all comes together helps organizations start envisioning what their own path up the pyramid could be. And that’s just the kind of forward thinking we want to inspire!
NetHope versus the Pyramid NetHope formed in 2001, when Edward G. Happ – then CIO at Save the Children – realized that several of the world’s largest development organizations (Save the Children, World Vision, Red Cross, etc.) all faced very similar IT challenges in delivering their missions. Happ saw the opportunity to help the CIOs of these NGOs share resources, skills, and knowledge around technology. What resulted is a unique collaboration of more than 30 of the world’s leading international humanitarian organizations working together to tackle social challenges in the developing world. Today, NetHope represents humanitarian development, emergency response and conservation programs serving millions of beneficiaries in more than 180 countries. The organization is a catalyst for collaboration and innovative IT solutions. But, we all start somewhere… Even NetHope, tech beacon that they are today, had to start at the bottom (of the IT pyramid, that is). Their experience in the pyramid illustrates the importance of building a strong foundation of stable and secure technology that enables an organization to focus on more mission-focused IT solutions. In its early days, NetHope struggled with the same issues many nonprofits do: its members were on different versions of software and operating systems and their staff lacked the know-how to use the IT tools it had. Before NetHope could tackle the big IT vision, they had to start with the basics: get its members on a common software platform and train staff. With the help of donated Microsoft software and curriculum, they did just that. Next, NetHope members, in partnership with Accenture, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others, launched a shared-services model to provide greater collaboration among its members. With the standard platform in place, members were able to use IT to address an array of common services such as help desk, procurement, and training. The shared-services collaboration realized 15-40 percent savings gains and, more importantly, it built capacity in the field to enable greater service delivery. With a stable foundation and optimal service delivery processes in place, NetHope was well-positioned to pursue how IT could serve their mission and beneficiaries. They set out to transform connectivity, communication, and collaboration during disaster response by developing the Network Relief Kit (NRK). Created with help from Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Accenture, and others, the NRK is a backpack that uses solar power and satellite communications to provide Internet connectivity, even in the most remote of locations. Requiring only 15 minutes of setup time, this innovative IT solution (dare I say, Jetpack?) enables communications in the field during the critical days immediately following a disaster. As I write this, NetHope member organizations are using connectivity tools and resources (including the kits) to coordinate on-the-ground relief efforts in Pakistan. (The NetHope consortium has also played a critical role in resuming broadband Internet connectivity in Haiti, facilitating ongoing relief and rebuilding efforts there). This is the ultimate in transformative technology – NRKs truly help NetHope save lives.
NetHope formed in 2001, when Edward G. Happ – then CIO at Save the Children – realized that several of the world’s largest development organizations (Save the Children, World Vision, Red Cross, etc.) all faced very similar IT challenges in delivering their missions. Happ saw the opportunity to help the CIOs of these NGOs share resources, skills, and knowledge around technology. What resulted is a unique collaboration of more than 30 of the world’s leading international humanitarian organizations working together to tackle social challenges in the developing world. Today, NetHope represents humanitarian development, emergency response and conservation programs serving millions of beneficiaries in more than 180 countries. The organization is a catalyst for collaboration and innovative IT solutions.
But, we all start somewhere…
Even NetHope, tech beacon that they are today, had to start at the bottom (of the IT pyramid, that is). Their experience in the pyramid illustrates the importance of building a strong foundation of stable and secure technology that enables an organization to focus on more mission-focused IT solutions. In its early days, NetHope struggled with the same issues many nonprofits do: its members were on different versions of software and operating systems and their staff lacked the know-how to use the IT tools it had. Before NetHope could tackle the big IT vision, they had to start with the basics: get its members on a common software platform and train staff. With the help of donated Microsoft software and curriculum, they did just that.
Next, NetHope members, in partnership with Accenture, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others, launched a shared-services model to provide greater collaboration among its members. With the standard platform in place, members were able to use IT to address an array of common services such as help desk, procurement, and training. The shared-services collaboration realized 15-40 percent savings gains and, more importantly, it built capacity in the field to enable greater service delivery.
With a stable foundation and optimal service delivery processes in place, NetHope was well-positioned to pursue how IT could serve their mission and beneficiaries. They set out to transform connectivity, communication, and collaboration during disaster response by developing the Network Relief Kit (NRK). Created with help from Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Accenture, and others, the NRK is a backpack that uses solar power and satellite communications to provide Internet connectivity, even in the most remote of locations. Requiring only 15 minutes of setup time, this innovative IT solution (dare I say, Jetpack?) enables communications in the field during the critical days immediately following a disaster. As I write this, NetHope member organizations are using connectivity tools and resources (including the kits) to coordinate on-the-ground relief efforts in Pakistan. (The NetHope consortium has also played a critical role in resuming broadband Internet connectivity in Haiti, facilitating ongoing relief and rebuilding efforts there). This is the ultimate in transformative technology – NRKs truly help NetHope save lives.
But I can’t design (nor do we need) a solar-powered backpack, you say!
Well, thank goodness for that! We know that not all organizations are going to have the need, resources or alignment that NetHope did to create the equivalent of the Network Relief Kit for your organization. What matters is this: That we understand what’s possible when we stop thinking of technology as a back-office, administrative headache, and start thinking of it as a strategic mission-delivery tool. The solution at the top of the pyramid for your organization may be completely different than NetHope’s (likely much simpler), but I hope their example will help you think creatively.
Understanding the pyramid framework can change the way nonprofits talk about and approach technology adoption. As Edward G. Happ said, “We have to start, not with an inward technology focus, but with a look outward to the technology that can move our missions forward!” Happ advises that we cannot spend all our technology time and resources at the “Lights-on, base of the pyramid” stage, and that – even as we shore up our IT foundations – we should be thinking about technology at upper levels of the pyramid.
So here’s my call to action: Look up. Take the pyramid framework to your next staff/board meeting, and talk about where your organization’s use of IT is today. Then take 30 minutes to talk about what technology at the top of the pyramid could look like for your organization. I can’t guarantee you that having this conversation will get you to the top of the pyramid, but I can guarantee that – if you never have this conversation – you won’t get there. Imagine if NetHope didn’t take the time to have this discussion… How would their ability to respond to disasters be different today?
Try it. Tell me what you think. And here’s to using technology, not just because it’s cool, or the hot latest trend, but because it’s going to help us change the world.
Missed the previous installments? Part One in this series available here. Part Two in this series available here. Part Three in this series available here.
Lindsay Bealko helps Microsoft Community Affairs put technology know-how in the hands of nonprofits through resources like webinars, NGO Connection Days, and software donations. With several years’ experience in the nonprofit sector, Lindsay understands the unique challenges and opportunities nonprofits face when trying to adopt technology to help them meet their missions. She tweets (occasionally) from @linzbilks.