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While many of us are privileged enough to go to college, barriers to girls’ education throughout the world show us that we shouldn’t take school for granted. That’s why the United Nations created the International Day of the Girl: to promote the rights of girls and address the unique challenges they face. The theme for this year’s International Day of the Girl, which took place on Friday, October 11, was “Innovating for Girls’ Education.”
Coinciding with this year’s theme, Intel and UNICEF along with Stanford University and Contra Costa College students held an event on October 5th called the Code for Good Hackathon. The Hackathon highlighted the potential for corporations, nonprofit organizations and academic institutions to work together to develop solutions to world problems through technology. The goal of the Code for Good Hackathon was to create solutions that would address barriers facing girls’ education in South Sudan.
Girls’ education is the most powerful investment for the promotion of sustainable development—it raises overall economic productivity, lowers infant and maternal mortality, educates the next generation and improves nutrition and health. But while great strides have been made in the past few decades with an unprecedented number of girls enrolling in school, 66 million are still out of school, and those who do attend school face obstacles related to safety, discrimination and financial stress.
The world needs new, creative solutions to help girls everywhere overcome these barriers. For this reason, the 24-hour Hackathon, hosted by Intel for Change Student Ambassador and Stanford senior Agatha Bacelar, had students pulling an all-nighter for the purpose of creating solutions to make education more accessible for girls in South Sudan. The event included Skype participation by members of the UNICEF team based in South Sudan and by open source coders for KA Lite, an offline version of Khan Academy (a nonprofit educational website). Offline solutions are important because less than 1 percent of the South Sudanese population has internet access.
Some of the amazing solutions created during the Hackathon were a low-cost radio device that can receive text and audio content to relay educational instruction to remote areas, a teachers’ course creation template designed alongside KA Lite, search functionality to be integrated with KA Lite and a simulation game that illustrates the barriers to female education in South Sudan.
These projects developed at the Hackathon were showcased at UNICEF’s International Day of the Girl event in NYC. A video from the Hackathon was shown along with the solutions to barriers to girls’ education that were developed during the event. To learn more about Code for Good Hackathon and how you can make an impact on girls’ education, watch this video!