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About this Event
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic NGOs have had to ensure the continuity of the education of children in developing countries while schools were closing. Particular effort was placed on girls who were particularly affected by this crisis. During our discussion we would like to raise awareness of the challenges faced by NGOs and how they can and have set up innovative solutions to reach those girls and their communities in different regions of the world.
We will hear the experiences from the field of three representatives of NGOs who will showcase the solutions they are implementing thanks to technology and the roll out in India, Afghanistan and other countries:
Safeena Husain, Founder of Educate Girls, a non-profit focused on mobilising communities for girls’ education in India’s rural and educationally backward areas.
Meagan Fallone, Director, Barefoot College International. Barefoot College is an organisation which has developed comprehensive programmes designed to improve village life from all angles, wherever poverty exists in 70 countries.
Valentina di Felice, Head of Impact and Learning, Womanity Foundation, which works to accelerate gender equality through innovative investments to create more inclusive societies.
The discussion will be moderated by longstanding Giving Women member, Linda Elzvik. Linda is with GreenLamp, a Swiss nonprofit that, through education in healthcare and the provision of technology, enables young women in rural Ethiopia to make positive behavior, social, and economic change in their communities.
Please see below the bios of our speakers and brief descriptions of the three organisations taking part in the panel.
PLEASE NOTE: ZOOM access details for the panel will be emailed out closer to the time of the event
Bios of our Panellists
Safeena Husain: A London School of Economics graduate, Safeena is the founder of Educate Girls, a non-profit organisation that partners with the Indian government to identify, enrol, and retain out-of-school girls and to improve foundational skills in literacy and numeracy for all children. Under her leadership, Educate Girls was announced as an Audacious Project at the TED2019 conference, where Safeena shared the audacious plan of empowering over a million girls to enter the classrooms by scaling Educate Girls’ model to 35,000 marginalized villages by 2024.
Meagan Fallone: Meagan is an entrepreneur, a designer and a passionate mountaineer. Bringing these diverse talents together as the Director of Barefoot College International and Chief Impact Officer at InnoTerra, she exemplifies exceptional vision and commitment to social leadership while advocating for strong professional practices within a Social Innovation context.
Her commitment to empowering illiterate and semi-literate rural women across the developing world through mastery of technology, unlocking rural girls’ creativity and confidence while leveraging the human potential embodied in poor rural communities; is an inspiring journey of risk-taking and respect for the knowledge and skills innately existent within poor communities.
Valentina di Felice: Valentina has over 14-years’ experience in roles focused on the strategic design, management, and monitoring & evaluation of international development programs in the areas of women’s and girls’ empowerment and media for development.
Working for the Womanity Foundation since 2010, Valentina is now the Head of Impact and Learning, responsible to overview the impact of the foundation and of its programs and to lead knowledge management and learning processes within the organization. Valentina also designed and heads the Girls Can Code program, a ground-breaking vocational training program in English, basic computer literacy, coding and web development for girls in four public high schools in Kabul.
MORE ABOUT THE ORGANISATIONS
EDUCATE GIRLS
Established in 2007, Educate Girls is a non-profit focused on mobilizing communities for girls education in India’s rural & educationally backward areas. Educate Girls operates in some of the most rural, remote, and underserved villages across states like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh. Educate Girls focus on the enrollment, retention, learning, and life-skills of the most marginalized girls. The organisation does this via village-based changemakers called Team Balika and a hyper-local field team using a combination of old school door to door surveys and community mobilization….and cutting edge machine learning and advanced analytics.
Currently, Educate Girls is operational across almost 20,000 villages across 20 districts in 3 states of India. The organization has over 1,600 FTEs and over 14,000 Team Balika volunteers. Its 5-year (2019-2024) goal is to enrol over 1.5 million out of school girls and improve the learning outcomes of over 900,000 children across 35,000 of India’s most educationally backward villages.
Educate Girls is supported by global partners like Skoll Foundation, CIFF, LGT VP, EAC, UNICEF, Cartier Philanthropy, Oracle, Fossil, Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives, Finastra, Jasmine Social, AKO Foundation etc.
___________________________________
BAREFOOT COLLEGE INTERNATIONAL
For nearly 50 years, The Barefoot College has designed new ways to nurture and support a journey to empowerment, one village at a time, one woman at a time. We demystify and decentralise technology and put new tools in the hands of the underserved, with the objective to spread self-sufficiency and sustainability. With a geographic focus on the Least Developed Countries, we train women worldwide as solar engineers, entrepreneurs and educators, who then return to their villages to bring light and learning to their community.
Barefoot College International operates in over 2000 villages in 93 countries worldwide. The impact of direct training and services ripples out to impact more than 2 million people, giving communities access to clean water, lucrative livelihoods and safe, renewable energy. Their near 50-year journey has inspired us to learn and share the value of rural wisdom.
___________________________________
WOMANITY FOUNDATION
Womanity is a private philanthropic Foundation established in 2005 in Switzerland and also registered in Afghanistan, United Kingdom and the USA. Its mission is to invest in audacious solutions that accelerate gender equality and challenge gender norms to create long-lasting sustainable social change in the Global South. The Womanity Foundation’s approach focuses on testing new ideas, adapting and developing pioneering programmes as well as supporting partners in building they institutional capacities to achieve growth and scale. Womanity works in a close collaboration with social entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial organizations and champions innovations in social change and in philanthropy.
Its four main programs today are:
Girls Can Code, teaching coding and computer literacy to Afghan girls, preparing them for careers in tech.
Womanity Award, adapting and scaling innovative programs focused on prevention of violence against women and girls across different countries in the Global South.
WomenChangeMakers, strengthening social ventures that benefit women and girls in India.
Leveraging the power of media to challenge gender stereotypes for a more inclusive society with different initiatives in the MENA region such as Radio Nisaa and Smi’touha Menni.
The Womanity Foundation believes that when women prosper, humanity thrives.
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About this Event
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic NGOs have had to ensure the continuity of the education of children in developing countries while schools were closing. Particular effort was placed on girls who were particularly affected by this crisis. During our discussion we would like to raise awareness of the challenges faced by NGOs and how they can and have set up innovative solutions to reach those girls and their communities in different regions of the world.
We will hear the experiences from the field of three representatives of NGOs who will showcase the solutions they are implementing thanks to technology and the roll out in India, Afghanistan and other countries:
Safeena Husain, Founder of Educate Girls, a non-profit focused on mobilising communities for girls’ education in India’s rural and educationally backward areas.
Meagan Fallone, Director, Barefoot College International. Barefoot College is an organisation which has developed comprehensive programmes designed to improve village life from all angles, wherever poverty exists in 70 countries.
Valentina di Felice, Head of Impact and Learning, Womanity Foundation, which works to accelerate gender equality through innovative investments to create more inclusive societies.
The discussion will be moderated by longstanding Giving Women member, Linda Elzvik. Linda is with GreenLamp, a Swiss nonprofit that, through education in healthcare and the provision of technology, enables young women in rural Ethiopia to make positive behavior, social, and economic change in their communities.
Please see below the bios of our speakers and brief descriptions of the three organisations taking part in the panel.
PLEASE NOTE: ZOOM access details for the panel will be emailed out closer to the time of the event
Bios of our Panellists
Safeena Husain: A London School of Economics graduate, Safeena is the founder of Educate Girls, a non-profit organisation that partners with the Indian government to identify, enrol, and retain out-of-school girls and to improve foundational skills in literacy and numeracy for all children. Under her leadership, Educate Girls was announced as an Audacious Project at the TED2019 conference, where Safeena shared the audacious plan of empowering over a million girls to enter the classrooms by scaling Educate Girls’ model to 35,000 marginalized villages by 2024.
Meagan Fallone: Meagan is an entrepreneur, a designer and a passionate mountaineer. Bringing these diverse talents together as the Director of Barefoot College International and Chief Impact Officer at InnoTerra, she exemplifies exceptional vision and commitment to social leadership while advocating for strong professional practices within a Social Innovation context.
Her commitment to empowering illiterate and semi-literate rural women across the developing world through mastery of technology, unlocking rural girls’ creativity and confidence while leveraging the human potential embodied in poor rural communities; is an inspiring journey of risk-taking and respect for the knowledge and skills innately existent within poor communities.
Valentina di Felice: Valentina has over 14-years’ experience in roles focused on the strategic design, management, and monitoring & evaluation of international development programs in the areas of women’s and girls’ empowerment and media for development.
Working for the Womanity Foundation since 2010, Valentina is now the Head of Impact and Learning, responsible to overview the impact of the foundation and of its programs and to lead knowledge management and learning processes within the organization. Valentina also designed and heads the Girls Can Code program, a ground-breaking vocational training program in English, basic computer literacy, coding and web development for girls in four public high schools in Kabul.
MORE ABOUT THE ORGANISATIONS
EDUCATE GIRLS
Established in 2007, Educate Girls is a non-profit focused on mobilizing communities for girls education in India’s rural & educationally backward areas. Educate Girls operates in some of the most rural, remote, and underserved villages across states like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh. Educate Girls focus on the enrollment, retention, learning, and life-skills of the most marginalized girls. The organisation does this via village-based changemakers called Team Balika and a hyper-local field team using a combination of old school door to door surveys and community mobilization….and cutting edge machine learning and advanced analytics.
Currently, Educate Girls is operational across almost 20,000 villages across 20 districts in 3 states of India. The organization has over 1,600 FTEs and over 14,000 Team Balika volunteers. Its 5-year (2019-2024) goal is to enrol over 1.5 million out of school girls and improve the learning outcomes of over 900,000 children across 35,000 of India’s most educationally backward villages.
Educate Girls is supported by global partners like Skoll Foundation, CIFF, LGT VP, EAC, UNICEF, Cartier Philanthropy, Oracle, Fossil, Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives, Finastra, Jasmine Social, AKO Foundation etc.
___________________________________
BAREFOOT COLLEGE INTERNATIONAL
For nearly 50 years, The Barefoot College has designed new ways to nurture and support a journey to empowerment, one village at a time, one woman at a time. We demystify and decentralise technology and put new tools in the hands of the underserved, with the objective to spread self-sufficiency and sustainability. With a geographic focus on the Least Developed Countries, we train women worldwide as solar engineers, entrepreneurs and educators, who then return to their villages to bring light and learning to their community.
Barefoot College International operates in over 2000 villages in 93 countries worldwide. The impact of direct training and services ripples out to impact more than 2 million people, giving communities access to clean water, lucrative livelihoods and safe, renewable energy. Their near 50-year journey has inspired us to learn and share the value of rural wisdom.
___________________________________
WOMANITY FOUNDATION
Womanity is a private philanthropic Foundation established in 2005 in Switzerland and also registered in Afghanistan, United Kingdom and the USA. Its mission is to invest in audacious solutions that accelerate gender equality and challenge gender norms to create long-lasting sustainable social change in the Global South. The Womanity Foundation’s approach focuses on testing new ideas, adapting and developing pioneering programmes as well as supporting partners in building they institutional capacities to achieve growth and scale. Womanity works in a close collaboration with social entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial organizations and champions innovations in social change and in philanthropy.
Its four main programs today are:
Girls Can Code, teaching coding and computer literacy to Afghan girls, preparing them for careers in tech.
Womanity Award, adapting and scaling innovative programs focused on prevention of violence against women and girls across different countries in the Global South.
WomenChangeMakers, strengthening social ventures that benefit women and girls in India.
Leveraging the power of media to challenge gender stereotypes for a more inclusive society with different initiatives in the MENA region such as Radio Nisaa and Smi’touha Menni.
The Womanity Foundation believes that when women prosper, humanity thrives.