Service › Reden 2011 > John E. Davies

 

23. Februar 2011
Gastvortrag anlässlich der Verleihung des digita 2011

 
 
John E. Davies, Vice President, Sales and Marketing Group, General Manager, Intel World Ahead Program, Intel Corporation

- Es gilt das gesprochene Wort -

Danke. Guten Tag, mein Deutsch ist nicht sehr gut. Ich spreche in English.

It's a pleasure to be at the digita awards here and I want to take a few minutes and speak about the programs we have at Intel, because many of you will know us as a chip company and you may wonder "Why is a
 

 
  chip company part of education excellence awards?"

For several years, we've been involved in programs to transform education. We think it's critical for countries, its critical for the children. It's also a very good business to be in. So we're very happy to do that. And we invest in this. And what we do is spend our time in four areas.

  
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No. 1 is platforms. So we do, for example, a very low cost kids computer. Its rugged, you can spill liquid on it, you can drop it on the floor - it's a kind of child-proof PC. You see many of them around here at the show and we've been taking that to many countries. Very often with local companies, resembling it or putting their name on it. And we have driven that in there on the education market.

The second area is, if you have a computer, you need this to be connected to the internet. So we work with the Telecoms, we work with the service providers, we work with the regulators around the world to try and make sure that either these computers have broadband build into them or that the schools get connected via many types of mechanisms with government and service providers. So you have to be connected.
 

The third area is probably an area that we do from our philanthropy side. It's what comes from our corporate affairs and - we do training. We have a program that trains teachers. It has trained nearly 10 million teachers around the world in the past ten years. And that program has trained 450.000 teachers here in Germany which is about one half of the number of teachers. It has trained them for at least 20 hours on how you use a computer in the classrooms. So they get fluent with this because the kids grew up with computers, maybe the teacher didn't. And it has trained about half the teachers for at least 20 hours of using that computer in the classroom.

At the same time from that side, we work with portals - we have a maths and science portal. It's in about 15 different languages around the world and many countries are translating this and we give a free license to that as well. On our philanthropy side, we probably spend abound a 100 million dollars a year on philanthropy promoting education and it's where we just about spend all of our corporate social responsibility money in that area - it's all on education. And it's critical for us because we think it's needed to help transform education. Now, if you look at the programs around the world that we work with - they may be on university students, on training teachers, on content, on helping equipping classrooms or, in some cases - in the world ahead program - bringing computers into the health care marketplace or small business in emerging marketplaces.
 

In 2010, we did a count that we had about 300 different types of programs in about 90 countries. So we're not in every country in the world, we can't reach every country, but we reach many many of them and our partners tend to take our programs into the countries that we can't reach. It is not everyone but it gets to many of them. I want to give you a few flavours of these, just so you get an idea what goes on in different countries. As I said, in Germany about 450.000 of the teachers here have been for Intel Teach. That's a very recommendable number and at 50 % of the teachers that is one of the highest ratios in the world and for a larger population country that may be the highest percent in the world. So really congratulations on that to people in Germany - and maybe a personal congratulations to Prof. Hendricks because I know you have been helping us a lot in that program. So a big thank you, "Danke" to you on that. If you look in different countries there are many of these and I will just give you a few examples. In Portugal we have been working for the last two years there. Actually it is a smaller country than Germany but in Portugal - 10 million people - every single child there has one of these low cost rugged laptops. In fact, it has become big enough that Portugal builds themselves. They assemble them locally, they have made the local industry around it and they have used some of the profits from that local industry and exporting to pay for some of their education deployments. They have made an industry out of this. The teachers are getting trained, there is some local content and just about every primary and secondary school child has one of these laptops. And so in the last two years they have gone from 20 children sharing a laptop to just about one on one. All the teachers have these. And that system is really getting built - implemented very strongly.

 

Another country we have worked closely with recently is Turkey. In Turkey there are 620.000 teachers. Recently, from the universal service fund, that's the phone tax - that 3% tax that many countries pay on the phone – it is there for universal connectivity. But with cell phones everyone is connected. So, in Turkey they have taken that money and are spending it on making sure every teacher gets a laptop. Now as part of that we are training the teachers. There are content portals and maths and science portals, school is in Turkish. So, in maths and science they are starting to use that and we are helping enable the industry there. So every teacher equipped and they will move a PC into every classroom across the majority of subjects. So that makes a difference as well.

If you look at another country that is very interesting, I'm going to pick a very very poor country and surprise you. In a country like Guatemala, every single teacher there has a computer that they use in school. We are training those and the country could not afford to give the teacher computers so they did it by salary deduction. They did it by a voucher to cover the cost of the VAT. They did this by slightly different salary scales if the teachers were trained. Smaller countries can be a lot more flexible than the EU, but basically every teacher there has a computer. They are all being trained. They have a school portal in Spanish and they have even translated into Mayan for some of the indigenous people there. So they have some content. So that is another kind of program.
 

The last one I will tell you about is Argentina because it has been very recent: If you get out of the Buenos Aires airport - the first billboard you'll see is not from a cell phone company, it's from the local government. It talks about "tres milliones des netbooks". It means they have committed to 3 million laptops for the kids, secondary school. Children are about 11 or 12. So far there are about 600.000 of these deployed. and they place order for another one and half million so there'll be over 2 million by the end of 2011. That means most of the 11, 12, 13, 14 year olds each have a laptop in school. We're franticly trying to train the teachers there. We have been working very quickly on the content in Spanish to try and help that program go.

So, these are the kind of areas that we try and work to bring programs to many many different countries. Like I say, in Germany, a big big focus here has been on training teachers and you're one of the leaders in this. Now, the reason we do that is, when we talk to governments we end up in conversations that talk about education is the foundation. Then as children leave the schools and move to universities and jobs, we like to encourage entrepreneurs. This science and innovation and jobs creation and all around the world that's one of the most important conversations we find ourselves in: "How can I use technology to create my job, to create my business, to create my service, to add value to my country, to be employed myself and create jobs?" So, that is a big big push. It is this education, entrepreneurs' employment. And we have courses on teaching entrepreneurs. We have courses on working with capital investment companies. Some of these are university courses. Thomas Osburg, sitting there in the front row, drives a number of these in Europe and you use facilities here, for example, like, the Munich Open Lab, Open University to help drive some of the programs. A number of these Labs are around Germany. So that's where we spend our time and effort.
 

The goal is to encourage excellence. We want to encourage and do anything we can to encourage the younger people and the education to stand out and do better and better jobs for their country and their people. And so, we have a number of different contests and competitions to support this. There is a teacher excellence program where the teachers have contests. And they look at the content they create and they look at some of the teaching they do and we have some contests on this to try and encourage excellence, promote it and share it amongst different teachers. That is really a big program. Probably one that is bigger than that is the science and engineering foundation. We call it ISEF and we have about 60 countries around the world where in every one of them you have a contest that's on science and engineering where the youngest - the school children maybe 15, 16 years old - bring their science experiments, their mathematical theories and they have contests in their country. And they are encouraged to promote these; it gives them collaboration, its teams. It gives them that confidence and the winner from these get picked to go to the US and we have a big contest there, usually held in Washington. A CEO comes there, there's a big push on this. And the winners there actually win prizes that are as large as scholarships to universities. And that's to encourage this maths and science excellence because we believe globally there's not enough science and engineering graduates being created. The industry is going to need them over time and we want to encourage that excellence for that innovation.
 

Digita is exactly the same as that: Encouraging local excellence in education. You have heard of many of the different categories there and really we are delighted to be part of that because excellence is what it is all about. Any way we can do to encourage that excellence we believe is good. It is a good investment of time and energy and we are proud of being part of this and I tell you I would love to congratulate each and every one of the winners. Thank you so much for allowing Intel to be part of it.

Danke!
 
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