Katie Dupere :
Barbara lives in Uganda. She is a university student who doesn’t have access to Internet.
That is, until the biggest tech hub in Uganda opens.
After its opening, Barbara is able to connect not only to the world wide web, but to her peers. The hub gave her a space to learn and collaborate with others. More than that, it gave her the ability to keep up with the men who historically have more access to technology.
“There are boys and there are older people there she can now relate to,” Mariéme Jamme says. “She can sit down and say, ‘Oh wow, this is this. I can code. I can go do all this stuff.'”
Jamme, technology and education activist and founder of Africa Gathering, told Barbara’s story as part of a panel on the future of global education at this year’s 2015 Social Good Summit.
The panel was moderated by Sarah Brown, CEO of A World at School with panelists Kailash Satyarthi, the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Movement) and Keith Yamashita, founder and chairman of SYPartners, joining Jamme.
“We’re talking about the nearly 60 million children that don’t get a single day at school,”
“We’re talking about the nearly 60 million children that don’t get a single day at school,” Brown said to open the panel.
The panel brainstormed innovative solutions to the Sustainable Development Goal of providing “inclusive and equitable quality education” on a global scale. And it’s a major issue.
For Jamme, the solution to getting more education to more children is focused on supporting the population most vulnerable of not getting it – girls.
“What really works is giving an opportunity to girls…pushing for every single girl to have access to education,” she said.
Jamme knows what’s at stake first-hand: She didn’t have access to education until age 16. jamme wants to stop the cycle of keeping girls out of school, while also empowering those who have limited access to still claim as much education as they can.
When Satyarthi thinks of those most at risk from not having access to education, he thinks of the children who work all day to harvest cocoa beans in child slavery, but never dream of tasting the chocolate.
“Education is the most important tool in breaking the cycle of slavery,” Satyarthi said. “Breaking the cycle of child labor and education are two sides of same coin.”
According to Satyarthi, young people are hungry to make change to positively impact their futures – and they have the enthusiasm to do it.
“Education brings the dream and the life fulfilled,” he said. “So education brings life.”
But it isn’t just developing nations with problems regarding adequate education. When it comes to the United States, Yamashita believes the current high school model is not supporting a technology-focused society – and he’s helping to do something about it.
Yamashita is working as a consultant on the XQ Challenge, an effort looking to redefine and reimagine high school education in the U.S. The challenge asks self-assembled teams of entrepreneurs to develop a plan for what the future of public education should look like to best serve current society.
But the challenge’s message is one that is universal when thinking about the future of global education.
“Education is the mother of all design problems,” he said at the panel. “If you get it right, everything becomes solvable.”
(Katie Dupere is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Prior to her work with Mashable, Katie penned pieces about queerness, body positivity, sex and relationships for Gurl).
