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Apple Developer Academies In Brazil Link With Malala Fund To Create Groundbreaking Apps

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Malala Yousafzai is the young Nobel Peace Prize winner whose Malala Fund was set up to help provide secondary education opportunities for girls where it can't be taken for granted.

Apple

Updated with new details of the Malala Fund connection with Apple and more commentary from Malala Yousafzai.

Back in January, Apple became the first Laureate partner with the Fund, with the goal of getting 100,000 girls into education in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Turkey and Nigeria.

Now, that collaboration is expanding to Latin America.

This expansion means grants will be offered to local advocates in Brazil, who will join the Malala Fund's network of advocates, called Gulmakai champions, to implement projects created to empower girls, for example, through school enrollment efforts, skills development and more.

And in Brazil there will also be a new feature to the collaboration which is quintessentially Apple: a connection to the Apple Developer Academy students there, encouraging them to design new apps. Malala dropped in on the Academy in Rio on July 13 to launch this.

Apple

Lisa Jackson, Vice President of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives at Apple, who previously ran the Environment Protection Agency for President Obama, is passionate about the partnership and told me this week that Apple is proud of its role in conjunction with Malala.

"Here’s an astounding young leader in her fairly young organisation. We have seen part of our role is to help build the base of support, so it can be around for a long time and be as effective as possible. We share the Malala Fund goal, which is for every girl to receive 12 years of quality education."

I had previously met Jackson, along with Tim Cook and Malala, in Beirut for the first-stage announcement in January.

Apple

Cook told me then: “We have expertise in education. You know we’ve been serving the ‘ed’ market for 40 years; for the length of time of the company. It was a key focus of Steve’s from the start and so we’ve built an expertise of what our products can do in a teaching environment and how they can fuel student achievement.

“We’ve done that in many different settings from very underprivileged schools to the polar opposite. And we have touched a significant number of people with our coding initiative, using our retail stores working with many different groups that are touching girls’ organisations and students in general, but very focused on girls as well.

“Of course, we have an expertise in scaling and we have lots of people in different countries across the world. So, it seemed like the most important things to me are always values and the vision. And those are the same and then when I thought through this, it seemed like we could bring a lot in support of Malala’s vision.”

But the new announcement indicates a different kind of integration with Apple as well.

Jackson explained, "We came up with an idea together that one of the things we could also add was the app ecosystem. We have 10 Apple Developer Academies in Brazil that have been there for a number of years. There are 500 students enrolled there now but hundreds more alumni, many of whom have just amazing stories and we’ve found that with these students at the app developer academies, we get great results when we frame things in terms of creating apps designed to change the world for the better."

The Apple App Store has such reach that the right app can make a real difference.

At Apple's World Wide Developers' Conference last month, 75 students from the Brazil academies attended as scholarship winners, so there's clearly a strong contingent there.

Malala challenged the students to develop aps that affect girls' education. Jackson told me: "Then Malala Fund will work over the course of the year to adapt these apps to make them impactful and judge which ones they want to use. It really is an amazing part of the partnership that goes beyond the classic donation of money and goes to the heart of what Apple is about, to empower a person, giving any person the tools to pursue their passion."

Malala explained the importance of the role the developers when she visited them, saying afterwards, "By tapping into Apple’s network of student developers, Malala Fund will gain access to new tools to support our mission of free, safe, quality education. The students in Apple’s Developer Academy program share my passion for improving the world around us, and I am eager to see their innovative ideas to help girls in Brazil and across the globe.”

Lisa Jackson has high hopes both for the new app development and the original target. "We set the humble goal of reaching 100,000 girls in a year and I have no doubt that will be beaten. Apple has very much taken a supporting role in this, wanting to create something sustainable and which can be scaled."

That challenge is only just beginning, so there will be more to report in due course. For now, I'll give the last word to Malala, who has clear ideas of what it might achieve.

“My hope is that every girl, from Rio to Riyadh, can be free to choose her own future. Whether she wants to be a developer, a pilot, a dancer or a politician, education is the best path to a brighter future.”

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