Supporting great non-profit organisations doing work in India
As the holiday season approaches we thought it was a good moment to update you on
some grants we're making to support education, technology and the fight against modern
day slavery.
In India, eight of the selected grantee organisations will receive funding to aid them in the
valuable work they are doing across the country.
Fighting slavery and human trafficking
Modern day slavery is a multi-billion dollar industry that impacts the lives of around 27
million people. So we're 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. These
organizations 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.
STEM and girls’ education
Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) open up great opportunities for young
people so we've 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, we're supporting girls’ education in the developing world. By giving girls an
education, you not only improve her opportunities, but that 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 technology
We've all been wowed by the entrepreneurial spirit behind the 15 awards in this category,
all of whom are using the web and open source programming 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 recipient's 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.
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
