#12 'access to education' Katrin McMillan Founder Hello World
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There are approximately 260 million children worldwide who do not have access to education. Our latest inspirational founder believes that she has found a solution to this issue and the challenge she faces now is scaling that solution so it reaches enough children. Katrin McMillan founded Not-For-Profit HelloWorld in September 2018 at the same creating and designing solar powered ‘education’ hubs that brought the power of the internet to remote villages and cut off communities (See full description below). Hear in this podcast how Katrin overcame the debilitating effects of dyslexia at school and then the University of Bristol to overachieve in both her ensuing corporate career and her role as a social entrepreneur. Katrin was brought up in a house that despised injustice and this has helped to shape her thinking. Her parents are a South African / Australian mix and they both have close up experience of the damaging effects of bigotry through apartheid and subjugation of indigenous people. Katrin has lived in Nigeria, New York, Bristol, Australia and now London. She is a mother, a wife and a highly successful social entrepreneur hell bent on changing the world through he power of the internet to provide access to education. The Hubs Hello World deploys Hello Hub kits to communities in need of educational resource. Communities learn to build, use and maintain the hubs themselves, so that they can continue to gain benefit long after the Hello World team has departed. Each Hub provides wifi internet access, and is loaded with educational resources such as apps and games, in relevant languages. The hubs have weatherproof touch screens for easy interface, and are available 24/7. #Even if we combined the entire global budget for education, it wouldn’t come close to reaching every child. The traditional approach to tackling the education deficit is not working. There are 69 million too few teachers to hit current education targets, that’s just targets. We need an affordable, scalable and world-class solution for ALL children, no matter where they were born.” Katrin McMillan Project Hello World has a plan: a solar-powered digital education Hub where children can learn, and explore the world’s body of knowledge, right in the center of their community. Instead of “airdropping” a fully-built system into a community, Project Hello World works with the community to build Hello Hubs in places that are well below the baseline poverty index–where resources normally wouldn’t allow for these sorts of forward-thinking projects. Community members invest time, meals, lodging for Project Hello World volunteers, and responsibility for their systems as the Hello Hubs take shape. As the Hubs are built from the ground up, the entire community learns about its maintenance, importance, and possibility. https://www.projecthelloworld.org/