Development Cooperation Project Course – Grande Finale presentations

On 1 December 2010, the students from the Development Cooperation Project at Aalto University (TKK Language Centre) presented their project proposals in front of a Jury and Sari Baldauf, invited as a guest speaker, during a Grande Finale competition event.

Pia Lappalainen, the instigator of this course and an incredible and well-respected teacher  (she gave the students an amazing chance to win a prize and implement their own development cooperation project. I wish I had these types of courses when I was a student myself), opened the grande finale presentation by reading a poem she wrote for the occasion. Through the rhythm, the tone and the beauty of her poem, she manages to express all the passion she puts into her work. See for yourself:

Epilogue

Imagine a world where no-one cares

days like night hiding heartless stares.

The key to humanity so terminally lost,

hearts of greed the ultimate cost.

Imagine a life without hope for tomorrow

mournful faces reflecting but sorrow.

Only ourselves to trust and rely on,

compassion trapped inside hearts of iron.

Imagine a day without smile or joy,

moments of bitterness, grief and annoy.

What could be good, what could be ours,

we ravaged with our destructive powers.

What have I done, what have we done?

Why can we not just be as one?

I want to change, tell me where to start!

The time is now, I’ve opened my heart.

Now — imagine a world where everyone cares,

where the limit to goodness is in what one dares.

And imagine a life in concord with others,

people with people, like friends and lovers.

That’s where I’ll find fulfillment and joy,

from now on it’s kindness that I deploy,

in all my dealings and actions to come,

piece by piece, I add to the sum.

- Pia Lappalainen

The winning project is entitled Social Conscience and is related to giving charity organisations in Egypt access to ICT platforms to support their work. The prize was 10,000 EUR that the winning team will use by travelling to the country and implement their project.

The Jury members consisted of 3 persons: Anne Badan, chairperson of the Jury, philanthropic programme designer at A2B Philanthropy and Aalto Social Impact Founder and President 2010; Lena Hillebrandt from Aalto School of Technology; and Taija Townsend from Aalto School of Economics.

Sari Baldauf, eminent Finnish business woman and internationally respected, was present for the Grande Finale and gave a stimulating talk to the students on responsibility themes.

The projects were part of a multi-disciplinary course aiming at creating new types of learning contents and educational practices responding to today’s working life competence needs. Instead of teaching grammar and English, this endeavor strives to build a learning environment that allows students to activate and apply their English and communications skills in a real-life context. Such an approach promotes project management skills, self-leadership, ethical integrity, networking, social competence and global/social responsibility, while engaging students in goodwork that actually benefits some local community in a developing country.

For more information about the course (description, learning, outcomes, partners, etc), go visit: http://aaltosi.org/education/development-cooperation-project-course-2010

Find out more about the 5 different students’ proposals:

GROUP 1 – Social Conscience – WINNER!!!
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have revolutionized our society. It’s a paradigm shift. The conventional methods like physical banking, paper mails, fixed-landline phones have been replaced with more efficient online banking, emails and wireless communication. However, in developing countries, like India and Egypt, there are a lot of small scale charity organizations which have not yet been able to migrate to the new paradigm. It would take them a few years to take advantage of ICT. We intend to speed them up by those many years.

Another serious issue in developing countries is the credibility of charity organizations. Several fraud organizations exists, and the lack of convenient methods to verify genuineness prevents potential donations. Taking inspiration from Facebook and Wikipedia concepts, we intend to build organization’s reputation through public opinion easily accessible on internet.

Last, taking cue from Open Source philosophy, we want to use ICT skills of students to continuously support charity organizations.
Through this project, we also want to promote “Academic Social Responsibility”, analogous to Corporate social responsibility.
Some possibilities enabled by ICT:
• Financial packages like Tally to manage accounting, budget, taxes etc.
• Online website with net-banking, for online donations, and also for advertising the cause
• Managing public relations using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and online blogging
• Upload photo/video of work being done (it is said “seeing is believing”)
• Office Applications like Microsoft World / Excel for increasing productivity, using for internal and external communication and creating marketing documents
• Easy scanning, editing & printing
• Emails, instant chat, video calls
• Music and videos
• Keeping up-to-date with latest news, Wikipedia etc.

GROUP 2 – Chile reads
Background
Chile was chosen as the implementation country because of the inequality in the education. Uneven distribution of income combined with unequal opportunities in a moderately organized country provides an interesting platform to try to promote equality. We believe that Chilean students have the opportunity to take advantage of the improvement of the level of the education.

The Project
This project provides laptop computers and e-learning material for one public school in Chile. The outcome of the project is improvement in the literacy of Chilean low-income class children. Through this our project objective is to improve their motivation for education and increase their interest in reading. In the long run the overall objective is to increase their number of opportunities in working life and quality of living.

GROUP 3 – Delivery of relief goods for the flood victims
In July 2010 heavy monsoon rains caused massive floods in Pakistan.

Over 2.8 millions children under the age of 5 are suffering from high rates of malnutrition.

The first idea was to supply second hand clothes for the flood victims. The target group was women and children that are according to UNICEF this group is not reached properly in the refugee camps when it comes to non-food items. The partners we had on our mind were Pakistan airlines and red cross Finland for the transportation and Fida for supplying the clothes.

Even though this project was targeting for a good cause and for a positive social impact there were some severe challenges and we had to change the goal. Pakistan International Airlines informed us that they cannot help us in transporting clothes. They only transport food items. Red Cross Finland made told us that they cannot accept goods from other organizations due to security reasons and customs regulations. Secondly, the Red Cross was not sure if the second hand clothes would be accepted in Pakistan. Red Cross Finland is active in delivering clothes around the world, but the last time they have delivered clothes to Pakistan was 30 years ago. Therefore we decided to change the clothes to nutritious food items.

GROUP 4 – Recycled medical equipment to Ghana
Possible used items: Hospital equipment, beds, wheel chairs, crutches, strollers for old people, etc

The (core) idea:
The government-run hospital (Nairobi, Kenya) struggles to provide even the most basic services, since it lacks sufficient resources, equipment and staff. “We told patients to buy their own things because of the shortage of supplies,” explains Evelyn Mutio, the former head of the hospital’s nursing staff. “We told patients to come with gloves, to buy their own syringes, needles, cotton wool and maternity pads.” – (Source: Africa Renewal, Vol.21 #4 (January 2008), page 8 )

The quote above aptly unveils the source of our inspiration and highlights the health-care problems faced by many African nations. The problems are rather widespread and often attributed to the combination of inadequate infrastructure, trained personnel, and medical equipment. As our target country we chose Ghana, where is a big need in health-care equipment too and the political situation is safe enough to travel there for students without development help experience. Furthermore we found with Thomas Erkert a great partner who could and wants to help us to implement our project.

Group 5 – Paper bags to transport our message
Children living on streets, who no-one takes care of, has touched us. Instead of having a home to go to or going to school to be able to build up a brighter existence they are begging for living.

We want paper bags, folded by street children in playful sessions with NGO volunteers, to be their letters to society. By selling this in special shops and advertisements printed on it, it should be self-sustainable.

Not just paper bags
Paper is widely recycled in India. It is cheap to obtain and can for a small amount of money carry messages along with the groceries. During a walk home peculiar prints on a bag might draw the attention of its carrier. We aim to advertise information helping the cause of street children. Sometimes ideas act as a plug in an overflowing sink. If the misery of the weakest in the society is caused by wrong beliefs or short sighted attitudes, we want to provide a channel for attitude changing and informative messages. If advertisements did not work, why would so many billions of euros be spent on them? And if they do work, why would not our campaign work as well? You need a new perspective on familiar issues in order to open your eyes for the urge for change. This could be provided by cultural know-how of the locals and innovative spirit, even though we know it might be easier to move mountains than to change one’s mindset once it is fixed.

Equality campaign
On the front of the paper two children are standing separately: one on the left side, one on the right side. These two persons look different. One looks like rich, the other one poor, one looks healthy, the other one handicapped and sadly parted by distance. Paper, as plain sheet is useless for carrying things. When you add some glue and combine two sides, the bag is ready. Now these two children are close to each other, holding hands. This is the story we tell wordlessly to illiterate makers of the bags, but to confirm our message in the middle of the page is a poem of equality. We will also get a sponsor, who can print a logo on the paper bag. In this way, the sponsor can have good visibility in context of a noble cause. To ease the commitment in the pilot phase, the sponsor advertising will be free. Later, if the idea works and NGOs commit to it, the project can be supported partly by sponsor money.

Children’s education material
NGO Katha is an awarded organisation that publishes stories of street children to make a change. A story of theirs will printed to the educational side of the paper sheets. Khoj foundation has experience of teaching children comprehensive skills. Literate volunteers will read these exciting stories to children, at the same time acting as a role model of literacy. One handicraft session, in premises utilised by Khoj foundation, could include a group of 20 children lasting for an hour. These sessions take place after school time, thus we would not be discouraging school attendance. The children are invited by Khoj volunteers to learn hindi letters, simple math and equality. Each child will be given a paper sheet primarily as education material and secondarily to be folded as paper bags. In addition to that the children can do drawings on paper with crayons.