Girls in ICT Day: Meet Inspirational Women from mission*social

1. 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.

Inveneo Enhancing Educational Offerings and Spinning Off a Broadband Startup

1. Posted by Aaron Mason on September 12, 2013 in the categories: News, Uncategorized

Delivering sustainable computing and wireless connectivity is at the heart of Inveneo’s mission. Our belief is that technology can fundamentally transform the way a community engages with the world and pursues economic opportunities. Our commitment to this belief has brought us through designing and manufacturing sustainable hardware, serving rural organizations and building partnerships with local ICT entrepreneurs. The results have spanned from placing solar powered computer labs in thousands of schools to deploying large-scale broadband networks for healthcare, economic development and relief.

Earlier this year we revisited our strategy and began to make a few significant changes. We moved away from building and selling our own equipment to focused on identifying and sharing the best equipment and software solutions for education and connectivity. Now, nine months later, we’re using what we’ve learned to make a few more changes to our model, intensifying our focus on technology and connectivity for education and spinning part of our broadband connectivity team off into an independent venture.

Sharpening our Focus on Education

Education is going through a technological revolution on a global scale. With equipment costs plummeting, low-power device options multiplying, and with content and online education availability increasing rapidly, the potential for vibrant, sustainable models for technology in underserved schools is finally emerging.

At Inveneo we believe that this shift in the development landscape makes education the single most important place for our technology and expertise to focus. With recent large-scale education projects in Haiti, Tanzania, Uganda, and smaller projects in many more countries, we’re focusing on how to scale rollouts of computing and tablets to maximize sustainability and development impact with education partner experts. Our education technology solutions encompass all of the things we do best – low power computing, power systems, robust networks, management software and very importantly local partners to design, deploy and support the systems. We’re making education top priority moving forward. Our local partnerships are fundamental to Inveneo’s vision and approach, and we look forward to continuing our work with you, our partners, on implementation, support and maintenance, and business development.

Spinning Off Broadband

Another key decision is to spin out a new entity focused on accelerating access to broadband in emerging markets. Almost two years ago Inveneo launched our Broadband for Good (BB4G) initiative to determine how to drive critically needed broadband access by deploying cutting-edge broadband technology and new partner delivery models in developing countries. The BB4G initiative allowed Inveneo to explore the needs of countries, carriers and governments around the world and to deliver high quality, cost effective network models with local partners. This includes our Haiti network used by two major telecoms and covering a quarter of the country, as well as networks serving three education programs across the West Bank of Palestine and connecting islands and schools in the South Pacific. However one thing we’ve learned is that broadband, in a not-for-profit setting, is best suited for project-specific implementations. Inveneo will continue to deliver broadband projects for education.

However, the more we understood the vast need for broadband in the countries where we work, the more we realized that deploying project-based broadband networks, while highly impactful, would not deliver broadband at the same speed as a for-profit model.

Introducing Volo

Inveneo is proud to introduce Volo, Inveneo’s first spin-off, which will center its efforts on broadband services for emerging markets.

Volo’s goal is to deliver broadband in emerging markets around the world. Using our experiences during BB4G, the new Volo team will be working to provide connectivity using cutting-edge technology and a network of partners. Mark Summer and Kristin Peterson will head the new Volo team, however they will continue to serve on the Inveneo board and support our efforts.

What this Means for Inveneo and You

Refocusing our efforts and modifying our team will of course have an impact on Inveneo, as we are an exceptionally close-knit organization. There have been a few additional staffing changes, including the announcement of Bruce Baikie as Inveneo’s new Executive Director.

We want to make sure that you understand that while we’re excited to make our internal changes, these changes will not affect our current projects. We’re excited to have the opportunity to use technology to serve the communities we work in, and we aim to continue this as we push forward. We believe that this new focus will help us grow even faster, allowing us to help even more communities around the world.

We hope that as part of the Inveneo family you’re as excited as we are about these changes. Thank you for all the support you’ve given us over the past eight years, and we look forward to eight more!

Yours,

The Inveneo Team

For questions please contact either our partner manager FJ Cava at fj@inveneo.org or executive director Bruce Baikie at bruce@inveneo.org.