- Posted by Jana Melpolder on March 9, 2015 in the categories: Education, News
UNESCO and UN Women’s recent Mobile Learning Week conference in Paris was an ICT-focused event that brought together over 1,000 participants from more than 70 countries. As a participant representing Inveneo, Media Manager Jana Melpolder traveled to Paris to determine best practices on using technology to educate and empower girls and women around the world. She was pleased to run into several key ICTworks’ authors at the event, including Linda Raftree and Jim Teicher.
Ms. Raftree made a presentation titled “10 Myths About Mobile Learning and Girls’ Empowerment”, and it made a big impact in the way she thought about how mobiles affect girls. Several of her key myths of mobile ownership included:
- Cost being the largest barrier to owning a phone (which is not always true due to family pressures or societal norms that prohibit a girl from easily owning a phone)
- Mobile phones can’t address the real needs of girls (when in reality mobile phones can address important issues such as domestic violence, information for rape victims, and more)
- Vulnerable girls don’t have access to mobile phones (when in reality a girl may be borrowing a phone from friends, etc.)
Ms. Melpolder appreciate the insights that Linda Raftree and other speakers offered, and there were many terrific tech-related resources that were promoted for teachers throughout this event. However, the greater focus at the Mobile Learning Week conference should have been how parents could use technology to empower and educate young girls. Parents are a solid backbone to a girl’s education, and she believes that more technological resources need to become more easily available to them.
Technology that parents already own can be better utilized to push a girl’s education further and better prepare them for modern jobs. For example, since mobile phones are widely used in emerging regions, parents should more often utilize text messages about assignments that are due, or they should receive daily or weekly messages on what children are learning while at school. Additionally, teachers should use mobiles more often to communicate to parents what lessons a young girl is currently working on in school.
Engaged parents are vital to the education and empowerment of young girls everywhere, and resources should be made available to them just as often as they are made available to teachers. She hopes there is a better balance in the future – one where educational tech tools are brought equally to the hands of teachers and parents to make an even greater impact for young girls around the world.
- Posted by Jana Melpolder on March 1, 2015 in the categories: Events
Jana Melpolder, Inveneo’s Media Manager, recently attended the UNESCO and UN Women’s Mobile Learning Week conference held in Paris.
Mobile technology is increasingly becoming a valuable tool that educators around the world are using within their classrooms. When teachers use innovative tools such as a Raspberry Pi, tablets, and mobiles, they can combine them with an offline digital library, such as World Possible’s RACHEL-Pi.
What’s the end result? An incredible wealth of information, lesson plans, educational videos, and articles that can be accessed without the need for a reliable Internet connection.
This solution of creating an offline digital library was the main technological solution that Inveneo offered at the recent UNESCO and UN Women conference called Mobile Learning Week. Taking place in Paris, the event was held to connect organizations together that work to improve the status of women and girls through the use of education and technology. With Inveneo’s experience of 10 years working to connect those who need it most, Inveneo was on board to exhibit its work at the conference.
Jana Melpolder, Inveneo’s Media Manager, led the initiative to attend the conference. She created a display table which exhibited Inveneo’s ICT projects and technological solutions that are offered around the world. Inveneo’s exhibit table, shown below, showcased the team’s ICT projects with a main focus on Haiti, Uganda, and Sierra Leone. Ms. Melpolder also brought a Raspberry Pi, RACHEL-Pi, Asus laptop, Google Nexus 7 tablet, and Surtab tablet to give an example of what an offline digital library looks like and what it can do for classrooms around the world. Overall she was thrilled to meet so many inspiring representatives at the event who came from great organizations like UN Women, Butterfly Works, and 42 Education.
Ms. Melpolder organizes Inveneo’s ever-increasing and dynamic online presence. She previously volunteered with UNICEF USA, where she provided editorial direction to its web team and created its online newsletter for the northwest region of the United States. She is passionate about bringing human rights issues to the forefront through media and technology in the developing world, and she has reported on development programs from several countries including Bolivia, Ghana, Thailand and India. Her writing has been published on the World Vision, Beliefnet, and Twitter blogs. Jana’s educational background includes a B.A. in Anthropology from West Virginia University and a Master of International Development from the University of Pittsburgh.
- Posted by Jana Melpolder on April 24, 2014 in the categories: Events, News
It’s never too early to encourage a young girl to enter the growing ICT field. “Girls in ICT Day” was created to help young women appreciate and understand their potential – and to let them know how many diverse ICT career options are really available to them.
Young women have all the potential and talent to become great leaders, but they do so partly because of the women who forged ahead of them and helped paved the way.
Meet a few women who have worked in ICT for many years, some of them at mission*social – a unique shared workspace in San Francisco where our offices are located. These women have helped shape ICT to what it is today. Young girls celebrating Girls in ICT Day can look up to women like these to understand what it truly means to be a leader.
Heather Ramsey
Current: Senior Director of Center for Women’s Leadership Initiatives
Previous: Director of Women in Technology
As the Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships for the Institute of International Education, Heather Ramsey tirelessly leads the State Department initiative known as TechWomen in 16 countries. Techwomen brings emerging women leaders in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics from the Middle East and Africa together for both professional mentorship with their counterparts in the United States.
She also works to oversee Women’s Enterprise for Sustainability, Tunisia, a training and capacity building program for women-led organizations.
Previously she worked at Women in Technology where she helped provide cutting-edge training and coaching for women in business planning, professional development, information technology and entrepreneurship.
Kristin Peterson
Current: Co-Founder and CMO of Volo Broadband
Previous: Co-Founder, CEO of Inveneo
Within the ICT world Kristin Peterson is one of the leading entrepreneurs of her day. In 2004 she co-founded a non-profit ICT organization called Inveneo which has grown to deliver sustainable ICT and broadband projects that reach and impact over 3.2 million people around the world.
More recently she founded the company Volo, a “start-up connecting the next billion to the Internet”. Although her new company is only eight months old, its online community has been steadily growing.
She has received multiple awards including the World Economic Forum’s 2013 Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award from the Schwab Foundation and the 2011 ITU World Telecommunications and Information Society Award. In addition, she was a CNN Principal Voice back in 2007.
Jill Costello
Current: Manager of Special Projects at Inveneo
Previous: Board Member at Maranyundo Initiative and Founder of Pannotia
As Inveneo’s Manager of Special Projects, Jill Costello puts her heart and soul into her ICT initiatives, including Internet Now!, a project that is establishing 100 ICT work centers in rural communities across northern Uganda.
Before coming to Inveneo, she built the Maranyundo School where she helped to establish a school for underserved girls in Nyamata, Rwanda. Classes offer these girls not only a high-quality education, but also a great way to get online and connect to the world. The school enrolls 60 students each year, and Maranyundo now ranks #1 among all middle schools in Rwanda.
To further her passion for ICT and social justice, she also founded Pannotia, a social enterprise that provided construction services and collaborative design for sustainable projects in Africa.
Sybille Fleischmann
Current: Senior Project Manager and Owner of POSSYBIL
Previous: Director of Education Solutions at Inveneo
Sybille Fleischmann is a proven self-starter. She founded her own company POSSYBIL, focusing on project management for communities in developing countries with a focus on digital inclusion and education projects. Her list of clients includes Imagine Education, Microsoft, NetHope and See Your Impact.
Previously she worked at Inveneo both as the Director of Education Solutions and as the Country Director in Haiti. She planned and implemented the Haiti Connected Schools program which was created after the tragic earthquake hit in 2010 and provides 40 rural schools with solar-powered computer labs and computer training training for more than 400 teachers in rural Haiti. As County Director in Haiti she led the expansion of the The Haiti Rural Broadband Network to connect 20 rural communities in Haiti to the Internet, and built local capacity to expand and maintain the network.
Before shifting her focus completely to work in international development Sybille worked for 13 years at Microsoft in Germany and The United States. For several years she drove innovative technology projects as a project manager and product planner and later managed the solution development and deployment for large scale pilot programs at schools in Peru, Uruguay, Colombia and Rwanda.
These four women have made, and will continue to make, giant and positive impressions in the world of ICT projects. Collectively speaking, they have helped several million people gain access to sustainable computing technology and solutions worldwide.
Girls who are participating in Girls in ICT Day should try to find mentors and teachers who are like the women mentioned above. Young people, especially girls, are the future leaders of tomorrow, and the next step is for them to learn from the leaders of today.
