FreeContent4SustainableEcosystems/Mothers of Intention/Summary

Work in progress, expect frequent changes. Help and feedback is welcome. See discussion page.

Public description of your project

Mothers of Intention

• To develop a scalable and sustainable model for teaching basic literacy, numeracy, thinking skills and decision-making skills to very poor women and children in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh;
• To educate 6,000 mother-educators and 50,000 children
• To create a model of empowerment that can be used and adapted elsewhere in Asia.
• To develop clusters of support to strengthen local capacity
• To leverage the skills base of teacher educators to participate in development of free and open content;
• To increase the availability of free and open educational content on WikiEducator;

Proposal summary

Describe the purpose of the proposal, including its importance; the way you plan to achieve your aims; expected outcomes; and the way you will evaluate your success.

The Mothers of Intention (MOI) project will seek to collaboratively develop, modify and customize free and open educational content (focused on literacy, numeracy and decision-making skills) on WikiEducator. A cluster of skilled wiki experts and instructional designers with expertise in face-to-face and open and distance learning will develop and modify donated learning materials comprising the MOI curricula. Other print and multimedia materials (i.e., DVD, Decision-Making Toolkits) will also be developed. A grassroots 'Train-the-Trainer' curricula will be developed to train 6,000 Dhaka-based mother-educators who will deliver neighbourhood face-to-face learning to 50,000 very poor children by 2010. One hundred (100) workshops and mentoring/coaching activities will support project implementation.

Backgrounder - WikiEducator

• WikiEducatoris an e-learning and ICT initiative of the Commonwealth of Learning, an intergovernmental organization dedicated to fostering development and access to education through Open and Distance Learning. WE is led by Dr. Wayne Mackintosh, and is a website dedicated to the collaborative development of free content for education that anyone can modify and use. WikiEducator is working closely with the Wikimedia Foundation (the technology engine underpinning Wikipedia), and is a development platform for new technologies to support education.

• In 2008, WikiEducator's Learning4Content free wiki skills training project for educators was launched - with a $100,000 contribution from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California. The strategy of the Learning4Content project is to scale up training and content development by networking with 2,500 teachers, trainers and lecturers in 52 Commonwealth countries; and members of the Freedom Culture, most notably the Wikipedia community. In Year 1, WikiEducator has grown exponentially and is currently ranked within the top 8% of most visited websites in the world.

Value Proposition

• Focus on extremely poor mothers (to become neighborhood teachers) in Bangladesh
• A scaleable and sustainable model to reach 50,000 children by 2010
• Focus on basic literacy & numeracy
• Focus on higher level thinking and decision-making skills
• Focus on relationships, networking and volunteerism
• Leveraging the skills base of WikiEducator
• Developing free and open educational content - aligned to core values of the Freedom Culture

Partners

Amarok Society

Established in 1993 in Toronto, Canada, Amarok Society, is a charitable non-profit society led by Dr. Tanyss Munro and husband Gem Munro: both who have over 25 years of experience in education and development work with marginalized people. Amarok's slogan is Canadian compasion in action abroad.

Since 2005, Amarok Society has initiated new programmes for innovative ways of reaching some of the millions of ‘last mile' children in the slums of Dhaka. Working in partnership with the Baridhara Mohila Samobaya Samity, a Bangladeshi women's cooperative, Amarok Society has initiated the Mothers of Intention programme whose motto is Teach a mother and you teach a family, teach 5 mothers and you teach a neighbourhood. Through this approach, Amarok Society is turning very poor women into teachers for their children and their neighbour’s children.

From 1993-2004, Amarok's work focused on improving life prospects of Northern Canada's Indigenous youth (with the highest suicide rate in the world). It accomplished this by empowering the youth through establishing student companies with a social focus, including effectively improving literacy through music and songs.

Baridhara Mohila Samobaya Samity

Baridhara Mohila Samobaya Samity Ltd.,~ is based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. With depositors and members numbering nearly 40,000 poor women, it is probably the largest women's organization in Bangladesh, and is believed to be the largest women's financial cooperative in Asia. In 1989, it was launched as a project of WorldVision (and when Worldvision wished to close the project a few years later), the members undertook to operate it themselves.

After WorldVision's departure, Samity's spectacular growth and development took place. Its membership is solely women, who are able to enter into deposit programmes or take out loans. The Samity is distinguishable from Bangladesh's famous micro-credit projects in that it charges considerably less interest on loans; is non-profit; and benefits all members in its success. Samity works in a charitable partnership with Amarok Society to provide education programmes in very poor neighbourhoods of Dhaka, training mothers to become family and neighbourhood teachers.

iCentro Networks

• iCentro Networks is a division of iCentro Corporation (established in 1999, in Vancouver, Canada). iCentro Networks focuses on organization development and wiki and grassroots community facilitation, adult education and instructional / workshop design in North America and developing countries. iCentro Corporation is a consulting services firm specializing in project management, network-building, marketing and communications. Randy Fisher aka WikiRandy is iCentro's President & CEO, with 15+ years of experience in technology, business and not-for-profit organizations.

Requests for Assistance

Seeking project funding...

• linkage to development agencies
• linkage to banks / financial institutions
• Possible contacts for Funding

Contact Information

• Randy Fisher, iCentro Networks - wikirandy AT yahoo.com, or +1 604 684 2275

Work in progress, expect frequent changes. Help and feedback is welcome. See discussion page.