and an MBA and I started a manufacturing
business 25 years ago which I still run
and operate today I’m also a mother I
have two daughters who are of course
amazing young women today now as I
describe myself to you you probably have
an image in your mind of Who I am of
course you don’t know everything about
me and some things may actually surprise
you I’m a biker
I love motorcycling and it’s something I
took up just a few years ago in my early
50s but I can tell you that when I
parked my bike and take my helmet off
and people look at me a woman a rather
advanced years they certainly don’t have
the same image in their mind of Who I am
that you have because we tend to place
people in silos based on the context
that we find them in like to show you
this picture and it’s an image that had
the power to redirect my life many years
ago around 1998 1999 I happened upon an
article describing the situation of
women living in Afghanistan under
Taliban rule and that was well before
September 11th Surrey Afghanistan wasn’t
much on anyone’s radar the article
described how women there had to be
completely covered from head to toe in a
burqa they couldn’t leave home unless
they were accompanied by a male family
member they couldn’t drive they couldn’t
vote girls couldn’t even go to school
and I remember reading the article and
dismissing it right away I said in this
day and age that’s impossible
that women would be invisible in their
community like that I know what women
are capable of so I just really
dismissed it the problem is over the
next weeks and months and year I kept
seeing more and more of these articles
one day I was at home it was a Sunday
morning I was at my kitchen table and
had the newspaper
in front of me and yet again an article
about Afghanistan this one was the story
of a father who had just sold off his
nine-year-old daughter in marriage to a
warlord who was 20 years older than her
for seven hundred and fifty dollars I
was incensed I was furious I knew that
for all intents and purposes this young
girl’s life was pretty well over from
everything that I had been reading in
the past weeks and months I knew that
she didn’t have much as a nine-year-old
to bring to her new family at best she
would be a domestic slave and of course
she would be expected to have children
at a very young age and I was just so
upset how is it that women have such
little value in so many societies
because it wasn’t just in Afghanistan
this was going on in many countries and
I guess I was talking out loud and my
daughter’s happen to be at the table
with me at the time and my oldest
daughter turned around to me and she
said well mum what are you gonna do
about it
and the question stopped me called she
was absolutely right
I could rant and rave and be upset but
if I didn’t take action I wasn’t doing
anything to help change the situation
but then of course the very next
question that comes up is well what can
I possibly do I’m only one person
I have no experience in this area at all
and so I do what we all do when we have
a question and my question was why were
women seen to be of such little value in
so many societies so when you have a
question you google it so I started
surfing the internet and I talked to my
friends and my business colleagues who
would introduce me to other people and I
read and I attended conferences because
that question was bothering me to no end
and this went on for about a year and a
half or two years until it became very
clear to me that the issue underpinning
all this was actually quite basic and
quite simple it’s girls education women
are half of the world I’m a business
person if I only train half of my
employees for sure my business won’t
succeed and they’ll be a burden on my
business and they’ll probably be
resented eventually by the other
employees for not pulling their weight
so how is it that a community or a
country can expect to thrive when it
only educates half its citizens when
women are never given the chance to
develop their skills and their potential
they’ll always be seen is of lesser
value than the men who do have access to
an education and this becomes a vicious
vicious cycle that keeps going on until
that time when women as a role model in
the community can show what she can do
and to help move and improve her society
and as it turns out education really is
rather inexpensive particularly when you
think of it in terms of the stunning
outcomes it has in health on the
environment and the economy when girls
have just one more year of elementary
school education the maternal and infant
death rates decreased by 10 to 15
percent one more year of elementary
school if a girl manages to continue on
to high school for every additional year
of high school that she gets her
potential revenue increases by 15 to 25
percent which of course in turn impacts
the GDP in the country educated girls
tend to have smaller families and are
less involved in child marriages
educated mothers are much more likely to
send all their children to school both
boys and girls and girls education
decreases the incidence of
hiv/aids and malaria and the list goes
on education isn’t just about getting a
better job later in life it’s very much
a matter of life and death for hundreds
of millions of girls and women around
the world when we don’t allow women to
have this access to education it’s a
little bit like the biker picture that I
showed you before we have no idea of
what the potential is there and don’t we
have so many complex issues and problems
to resolve in the world that we really
should be trying to reach and tap into
the intelligence and the brainpower and
the skills and talents of every single
person on the planet so in 2006 with a
group of like-minded women we set up a
foundation to support girls education in
the ten years since then being all
volunteers so we have very low
administration costs we’ve raised and
invested 2.4 million dollars and 20
thank you very much this is enabled over
20,000 children to have better access to
education and what’s been really
tremendous to us too is working with our
partners in the field have been really
amazing we’ve learned what works well in
girls education
I just like to tell you very briefly
about my first trip to Africa I was in
2005 I happened to be in Mozambique and
I was visiting community-based projects
and very rural isolated areas and I
still remember it so clearly today being
totally shocked by the prevalence of
mobile phones everywhere this was the
most isolated area you can imagine and
these people were extremely extremely
poor and yet they had cell phones and I
remember thinking at the time well that
makes no sense a cell phone in my mind
was a luxury of course they don’t pay
the same rates we do here but it wasn’t
until you started talking to the
community and to these people that you
you understood that a cell phone was
actually a life-saving tool it was
information a farmer could check ahead
and see where is the best market to sell
his produce in the case of a medical
emergency help might only be a text away
and it’s appended banking and financial
services and a lot of companies a lot of
countries with mobile cash transfer
payments such as in Pisa and Kenya and I
remember thinking at the time wow that
is really really amazing here is this
country who skipped over a whole
generation of Technology because they
never had landline phones and they went
to something that was much more suited
and really customized to their
particular needs and that thought stayed
with me over the years as I visited many
of our projects in different countries
but no more so than in 2013 when I was
in Sierra Leone we had been funding a
project for high school girls education
there and as I often do I’d like to
visit other projects and kind of
benchmark where we are so I decided to
spend a bit of time also at the
elementary schools now elementary school
in Sierra Leone in the Northern District
very rural isolated area of course is
not at all like it is here
the classrooms in one particular class
the teacher might have 30 40 maybe 50
students and the reason is is that
there’s a huge lack of qualified
teachers around the world it’s actually
estimated that there’s 69 million
trained teachers that are still needed
today to meet the demand over the next
10 years in developing countries so you
have a teacher with many students in the
class and there’s usually a chalkboard
but that’s pretty well it there’s not
often many teaching aides posters or
maps on the wall the kids don’t usually
each have a textbook and school supplies
are in very short order they’ll often
just be writing practicing their letters
and numbers on a slate with chalk as you
can see sometimes the classrooms aren’t
even completely separate they’re only
separated by a half bamboo wall so you
can imagine how it gets pretty noisy in
there and of course there’s no
electricity there’s no computers and
there’s no access to the Internet so
when I was there I decided to spend a
little bit of time with the kids in
grade 5 in grade 6 and it became very
clear very quickly that they weren’t
learning it even close to their grade
level their reading and writing skills
were nowhere near where they should be
and it was heartbreaking because you
know how much the parents have to give
up to make sure that their kids can
attend school and they count so much on
a quality education to help their
children and to help the family get out
of poverty and yet it wasn’t working at
all in fact it’s estimated that if we
continued investing and supporting
education in the developing world as we
have for the past 20 years it’s going to
take 100 years before all girls around
the world get to complete even junior
secondary school so as we were there or
we were thinking of this we said it just
doesn’t really make any sense and I kept
thinking back to the idea of the mobile
phones and technology and how that might
be able to change things so in 2013 we
decided to do something very different
and we introduced self-directed
computer-based learning we originally
started off with a Raspberry Pi which
you see very small device it’s a
wireless server so it’s basically a
computer it just doesn’t have a screen
or a keyboard and the device that we’re
using now we can actually download up to
500 gigs of content on this small device
now 500 gigs just to give you an
indication is the equivalent of about
100,000 books or about 4,000 hours of
video so we download all this content
onto this server we place it in a room
what we call our Learning Centre which
is sometimes just a classroom the kids
come after school so this is an
extracurricular activity and they have
access to all this material at no cost
they access it through either
smartphones or tablets or computers and
up to 50 devices can connect wirelessly
at the same time to one device so the
kids can work on absolutely anything
that’s on there and what we’ve done with
our partners is we’ve downloaded
academic material it all has to be
offline it can’t be web-based so it’s
somewhat limited but what we have on
there is literacy software based on
phonics there’s math tutorials science
history geography agriculture health
coding music there is so much content on
there and what is truly interesting is
that the kids can now see this material
in ways that they’ve never seen it
before
there’s maps there’s games there’s
interactive videos there’s talks
there’s role models from around the
world and they can actually reach this
content at their own pace and they can
work on what they want and what they
feel they need and what’s truly amazing
about this is that we can reach some of
the hundreds of millions of kids around
the world who don’t have access to
electricity or the Internet who live in
rural isolated areas and who could
benefit from some of this amazing
content that’s being developed around
the world
by some of the greatest universities
NGOs and social entrepreneurs isn’t it
about time that we place these tools to
unleash the unexpected potential the
biker in every child in every girl and
enabled her to surprise us with what she
can accomplish and change the world thank you