As the holiday season approaches we thought it was a good moment to update you on some grants were making to support education, technology and the fight against modern day slavery.
STEM and girls’ educationScience, technology, engineering and math (STEM) open up great opportunities for young people so weve decided to fund 16 great programs in this area. These include Boston-based
Citizen Schools and
Generating Genius in the U.K., both of which work to help to expand the horizons of underprivileged youngsters. In total, our grants will provide enhanced STEM education for more than 3 million students.
In addition, were supporting girls’ education in the developing world. By giving a girl an education, you not only improve her opportunities, but those of her whole family. The
African Leadership Academy provides merit scholarships to promising young women across the continent, and the
Afghan Institute of Learning offers literacy classes to women and girls in rural Afghanistan. Groups like these will use our funds to educate more than 10,000 girls in developing countries.
Empowerment through technologyWeve all been wowed by the entrepreneurial spirit behind the 15 awards in this category, all of whom are using the web, open source programming and other technology platforms to connect communities and improve access to information.
Vittana, for instance, helps lenders offer loans to students in the developing world who have have a 99 percent repayment rate—potentially doubling or tripling a recipients earning power.
Code for America enables the web industry to share its skills with the public sector by developing projects that improve transparency and encourage civic engagement on a mass scale. And
Switchboard is working with local mobile providers to help African health care workers create networks and communicate for free.
Fighting slavery and human traffickingModern day slavery is a multi-billion dollar industry that ruins the lives of around 27 million people. So were funding a number of groups that are working to tackle the problem. For instance, in India,
International Justice Mission (IJM), along with
The BBC World Service Trust,
Action Aid and
Aide et Action, are forming a new coalition. It will work on the ground with governments to stop slave labor by identifying the ring masters, documenting abuse, freeing individuals and providing them with therapy as well as job training. Our support will also help expand the reach of tools like the powerful
Slavery Footprint calculator and
Polaris Project’s
National Trafficking Hotline.
To learn more about these organizations and how you can get involved, visit our
Google Gives Back 2011 site and take a look at this video:
These grants, which total $40 million, are only part of our annual philanthropic efforts. Over the course of the year, Google provided more than $115 million in funding to various nonprofit organizations and academic institutions around the world; our in-kind support (programs like
Google Grants and
Google Apps for Education that offer free products and services to eligible organizations) came to more than $1 billion, and our annual company-wide
GoogleServe event and related programs enabled individual Googlers to donate more than 40,000 hours of their own volunteer time.
As 2011 draws to a close, I’m inspired by this year’s grantees and look forward to seeing their world-changing work in 2012.
Posted by Shona Brown, SVP Google.org
