The Hult Global Case Challenge concluded over the weekend, recognizing winners in the three categories of education, housing, and energy – with challenges related to the work of OLPC, Habitat for Humanity, and SolarAid.
The education prize went to the team from Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College: Reggie Cox, Elizabeth Cullinan, Ketaki Desai, and Tim Kelly.  They took the prize for their “innovative approach to ensure streamlined laptop deployment and to create a global brand for [OLPC]’s open-source software.“ This continues a tradition of CMU support for OLPC – their ETC lab held a game jam in 2007, and other CMU campuses helped organize a 10-day OLPC Rwanda workshop in Kigali in 2010.
The team wrote about their experiences with the case challenge last month, in the Huffington Post.
Team submissions were judged by a panel of judges including: the CEOs of the three organizations whose case challenges were being considered, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, former NY Governor Mario Cuomo, Unilever Chairman Michael Treschow, and social entreperneur Darrell Hammond. All of the final submissions were excellent.
The challenge has given us many good ideas for how to improve and streamline our mission; just the judging process has been wonderful. The winning teams will share $1M to pursue their ideas; more updates to come as we see how this unfolds.
You can find a press release about the results here.
The President,
OLPC Association,
Japan.
Dear Sir,
RE: ASSISTANCE
On behalf of the management board, parent, Teachers and children of Daku Bhartiya school, I express my deepest and sincere thanks and appreciation to you, your club and your country for the very commendable services being rendered to the people of our country.
Sir, the locality in which the above school is built is generally a sugar cane farming area and it is located about 50km away from Labasa town in Vanua Levu, Fiji. People here are small scale farmers and due to this the economic status of the village is declining rapidly.
Sir, taking this into consideration we are finding it very difficult to meet the demands of the changing needs for school. We do not have enough finance to cater for all the things, in order to give quality education to the children of our school.
Moreover, to give quality education we have to move with the changes going around the education arena. One of the very important needs is the new technology. Sir, our school lacks the quality educational tools like computer for IT education at our school
Therefore, our school very humbly request if your organization would assist our children with some laptops .Our schools aim for this year is to introduce computer classes but due to insufficient fund we are unable to meet the requirement.
I hope for a very kind assistance during this very timely and genuine need. Your assistance in this course, through which our very innocent children of the poor locality will be able to have better and modernized equipments to uplift their education, will be very much appreciated and cherished.
We are looking forward for a very kind and favourable consideration.
May God bless you and OLPC association.
Thanks.
Yours faithfully,
Mr Dharmendra.P.Govind
HEAD TEACHER