A multi-cultural trio of young graduates starts an easy to contribute online scholarship fund to help the children in Cambodia.
Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948 says that: Everyone has the right to education.” In Cambodia, sending a child to school for a year costs between US$50 to $US100, and this includes expenses such as the purchase of books, uniforms, stationery, transportation and food.
Looking around your community, you would probably be hard-pressed to find someone who disagrees that every child deserves access to an education. Yet according to Singapore’s newspaper, “The Straits Times”, dated October 24, 2009, 500,000 Cambodian children of primary school going age are still not able to go to school due to poverty.
Hoping to harness technology to alleviate this situation is Mira, a young international non-profit organisation, founded by a multi-cultural trio of young graduates – 26-year-old Jens Thang from Singapore, 25-year-old Simon Tam from Canada and 28-year-old Sara Ortega from the US.
An African beginning
It all began in the summer of 2008 in Ghana, West Africa. Strangers from different parts of the world, Thang, Ortega and Tam had just started their one-year stint with Beltwater School of Technology, training post-graduates in entrepreneurship and IT as part of a community project. Though different in cultural backgrounds and life experiences, the trio quickly realised that they had one thing in common, the one thing that had brought them to Africa in the first place – their passion to help the world.
Drawing on their own personal experiences from their travels, the team eventually zeroed in on the area of education, particularly the provision of adequate educational opportunities for underprivileged children. Thang, CEO of the organisation, recalled one of these personal experiences; “When we were in Ghana, I met Princess, a seven-year-old girl who didn’t speak a single word of English and was not going to school. I later found out that she was the niece of a kitchen-lady and had been brought to the city to take care of her relative’s newborn. I was really curious about why this was happening and found out that the circumstances are not happening in a way that allow her to get an education. I started giving her my own private English lessons and this made me realise that people are really keen to learn, but like Princess, they are not given such opportunities.”
Bonded by this strong motivation, an ongoing discussion ensued throughout the African summer as to how they could manifest this passion into a working model that would in turn help the world and at the same time, leverage on their personal areas of expertise – entrepreneurship and IT. And that was how the concept of Mira (in Sanskrit, it means “prosperous”) was born.
Philanthropy meets technology
Mira is on a mission to “empower every child to reach his or her full potential by making education universally accessible,” according to its website. Its innovative method to achieve this goal leverages on the interconnection between three existing proven models – micro-scholarships, Web 2.0 non-profit and social platforms – into an end-product – an online scholarship fund. Last year, Mira got a financial boost, clinching one of eight winning spots for its proposal and bagging S$150,000 (around US$109,017) in the Lien i3 Challenge, a contest to spur innovative non-profit ideas that would impact Asia. The money is being dispensed into getting Mira off the ground, including staff and operations’ costs, on-site visits and fundraising.
So how does the Mira system actually work? To put it simply, Mira is essentially a platform that facilitates grassroots philanthropy by bringing together non-profits in Cambodia that are focused on the provision of education for children, and the generous general public on a virtual space. Simon Tam, chief technology officer of the organization, explained the mechanics of the system in greater detail; “Basically the general premise is that as a user, you can create your own fund with a general amount of money. At the same time, the NGOs that we partner with will upload their projects on Mira. What happens next is a user is able to browse through our website, look at the different economics of different projects and upon deciding on a project to contribute to, deduct from their own general fund over time.”
However, after donors pledge a monetary amount to a particular project, the transfer of funds is not instantaneous. Instead, only when the target amount of funds requested by the NGO to carry out a proposed project is reached, will the amount be transferred. As Ortega, Mira’s chief operating officer, explained,” So let’s say an organisation needs US$850 to resurface a gym/playground and buy sports equipment. We post that on Mira, and over a short period of time, the online community donates to that project. If that target US$850 is reached or exceeded, Mira wires the NGO. If the goal isn’t reached, Mira holds the fund under the donors’ Mira accounts, informs the donors, and they can apply the money to another project in need.”
But once a contribution is successful, the user is also instantly linked to the project and will be able to see how 100 percent of his or her donation has been put in use. “Once a user funds a project, what happens is we link them up with the project and so anytime a partner updates it, they will be notified and they can see photos and short blurbs, and texts and stories about how the project is progressing,” added Ortega.
The current project-oriented model is a modification to their initial scholarships-per-child model. Always seeking to improve on their processes, upon receiving feedback Mira switched to the current model, as it would have a wider and deeper impact than the former. Also, as Ortega added, “This will also avoid selection bias for individual students and be a more manageable model to monitor for both our NGO partners and us.”
When Mira is dedicated to ensuring that they user’s online philanthropic experience is intuitive and succinct, its founders are always clear about the end purpose of their endeavours. As Thang reiterated, “Fundamentally, the main purpose for us is for the kids, so we just want to make sure that the most important thing to us, the focus is to ensure that more kids are given the opportunity to realise their dreams.”
To do so, the trio found from their research that this would be most effective if these kids received education by 12 years old. Taking into consideration the stops and goes that may occur due to parents having to pull students out of the schools to work or help with the household sustainability, Mira’s services are consequently catered to providing education for Cambodian kids up to 19 years of age. As Thang explained, “What we found is that once kids pass a certain age, it’s almost 90 percent that they will not receive education in their entire life. That’s why we want to capitalise on this window period so that they will receive an education.”
The importance of fieldwork
It is with this clear goal in mind that the team is able to overcome the teething difficulties it has faced as newcomers in the NGO world in Cambodia. One of the major learning points that the trio has discovered is the importance of completing on-the-ground work to ascertain the feasibility of one’s innovation, and tweaking it to meet the needs of the people that the organisation is targeting. As Thang shared, “We’ve realised that we really need to be on the ground to find out if our innovations are really actually feasible. So there is a lot of talking and research, asking the right questions in a way that you can verify if your innovations will really work.”
The team also quickly discovered the importance of fieldwork in establishing beneficial partnerships with Cambodian NGOs. As a result, potential partners of Mira were put through a stringent process that includes telephone interviews, site visits, in-person interviews with the founders and a thorough check of their financial records. As Ortega noted,”We have an obligation to our donors and to our Governments to run a legitimate business so there’s a lot of homework that goes into the quality control of who our partners will be.”
Future plans
Looking towards the near future, since emerging victorious in the i3 Challenge organised by the Lien Centre at Singapore Management University, Mira has been able to move at a faster pace and is further along in its pilot stage of operations, thanks to the funding from its winnings. At this moment, the team is busy finalising the list of Cambodian NGOs that it is seeking to partner with for the pilot stage. It intends to complete its soft launch in June 2010 and roll out the beta version of the Mira system in the later half of 2010, which will be stable and complete. Mira hopes to acquire five new projects each quarter, starting in winter 2010, focusing primarily in developing Asian countries; thereby going beyond Cambodia.
Presently, Mira’s passionate founders have fully committed their time and resources to achieve this end. And they wouldn’t have it any other way. As Ortega poignantly shared.” We are working exactly in the area we want to be in. The luxury is not that we are making a million dollars but that we have peace of mind in doing something for the world and that we know we have the skills to make change and we are doing it.”
Mira is registered under the Non-profit Public Benefit Corporation Law of California for charitable purpose, where base operations are in San Francisco with satellite operations in Singapore. For more information on Mira, visit www.mirascholars.org
Read the original article as published in the Humaneity Magazine in July 2010.