Thursday, March 31, 2011
From Poverty To Prosperity: Engaging The Next Generation
Session Description
Global youth will demand a billion new jobs when they come of age. Yet for many marginalised or out-of-school youth, traditional routes to employment and entrepreneurship are closed. In the developing world, students with access to education face outdated curricula, limited access to new technologies and few connections to the marketplace. This session will discuss new approaches in creating a smooth school to-work transition for youth including what skills are needed today, how to foster innovation, and how to engage and inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs and employers.
When | Where
09:00 - 10:30
Thursday, March 31
Session leaders
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Ann Cotton is the Founder and Trustee of Camfed International, an organisation advancing girls’ inclusion in education in Africa. Under her leadership over 20 years, the organisation expanded its work from Zimbabwe into Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia, establishing programmes that enabled girls from poor families to travel through the education cycle from pre-school to tertiary level. Working in partnership with communities and African government ministries, Camfed has built around girls a social and institutional ecosystem in which they, and other children and young people, can thrive. In 2017, the 100,000th young woman joined the Camfed alumnae, each member transformed by education into a powerful role model and change agent. Ann’s vision of principle-based leadership continues to influence the international development sector. She has been awarded a number of honours including an OBE, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cambridge, Skoll and Schwab Fellowships, and a WISE Laureate.
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Director, Youth Learning, The MasterCard Foundation
Deepali is a skilled development practitioner with over 25 years of experience in planning and executing successful youth empowerment and education programs. Prior to joining the Foundation, she was a member of Plan International’s senior management team as the Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa. In this position, Deepali managed Plan’s programming in twelve countries and strategically led the process of organizational change in the region, including the establishment of key partnerships with national governments, and the development of a gender equality strategy. She has also worked in various leadership positions with child-centered development organizations in South and South-East Asia, and Eastern and Southern Africa. She is a recipient of the President’s Medal of Friendship, which was awarded to her by the Government of Vietnam in recognition of her exemplary efforts to advocate for vulnerable and at-risk youth.
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Dr. Martin Burt is founder (1985) and CEO of Fundación Paraguaya, a 33-year old NGO devoted to the promotion of entrepreneurship and economic self-reliance to eliminate poverty around the world. He is a pioneer in applying new poverty metrics, microfinance, micro-franchise, youth entrepreneurship, financial literacy and technical vocational methodologies to address chronic poverty around the world. He has developed one of the world’s first financially self-sufficient agricultural and tourism high schools for the rural poor. He is co-founder of Teach a Man to Fish, a global network based in London (3000 members-150 countries) that promotes “education that pays for itself” and which is partnering with more than 50 organizations from 27 countries to establish self-sufficient schools, mostly in rural areas. He has also developed the Poverty Stoplight, a new poverty measurement tool and coaching methodology that assists families to self-diagnose their level of multidimensional poverty and develop customized plans to eliminate poverty. This new metric is now being implemented in more than 30 countries by more than 100 organizations, including the US and the UK. Dr. Burt is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship at the World Economic Forum and of the Global Foodbanking Network. In public service he has served as Chief of Staff to the President of Paraguay, was elected Mayor of Asunción, and was appointed Vice Minister of Commerce. Dr. Burt has books published on economics, development, municipal government, poetry, and education and has received numerous awards. He holds a PhD from Tulane University Law School and is a Visiting Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of California, Irvine. Dr. Martin Burt was born in Asunción, Paraguay in 1957 where he resides.
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Student Outreach Programme Manager, TEDxKibera
Tabitha Wambugha Tongoi founded Project: A Book for Change at the age of 17 to address the insufficiency of textbooks in most Kenyan high schools in Kenya. Since its inception, “ABC” has raised over 20,000 books for 36 schools from all over Kenya. Having recently graduated from the African Leadership Academy, she will be pursuing further studies at Williams College in the US this fall. She is spending her gap year with TEDxKibera, where she is serving in poor communities in Nairobi to create a platform for sharing innovative ideas and inspiring hope.
