Here at Eging Translation and interpreting, we take pride in the community focused work we do, both locally and globally. Recently, we have been involved with the Vodafone Foundation.
The Vodafone Foundation is the company’s charitable arm which invests in the communities in which Vodafone operates, and is at the centre of a network of global and local social investment programmes. Much like the values we put behind our work, Vodafone shares our passion for providing people with the services and skills they need in order to succeed.
Vodafone Foundation
One of the aims of this foundation is to tackle barriers towards and inequalities within education. The goal of the work they have pledged to do is to help address the following key challenges:
263 million children in the world who do not attend either primary or secondary school
Unequal access to education depending on income and origin
Primary age gender gap persists and becomes more apparent as education levels increase
757 million adults and 115 million youths cannot read or write a simple sentence; two thirds of these people are women
Sub-Saharan Africa has the biggest gap in primary school enrolment rates. 34 million of the 57 million out-of-school primary age children live in sub-Sharan Africa
There are currently 16.1 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18, and of these, only 2.3 million have access to schooling.
In response to these large-scale challenges, Vodafone has set up several projects, such as Instant Schools for Africa. This is a programme that puts online learning tools in the hands of the children most affected by these disadvantages, so that they can learn from high quality text books, videos and maths and science exercises.
Localisation support
We are proud to have been able to be a part of creating these programmes, as Eging has provided localisation services for platform content for those markets where English is not the official language/school instruction language, namely French for the Democratic Republic of Congo and Portuguese for Mozambique.
“At Vodafone, we believe that the ability to access global information via an affordable device in the hand has the power to truly create a step change in education in developing countries” – Vittorio Colao, Chief Executive, Vodafone Group.
It has been proven that female students are those most likely to fall behind at school due to insufficient support and encouragement, and are even likely to be taken out of school before they can complete their basic education. These e-Learning programmes will help the children most susceptible to these issues learn without the need to be in the classroom environment.
