The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) and Princeton’s Business Today (BT) brought together Silicon Valley’s top VCs, CEOs, and startup teams to guide 100 of the most talented student entrepreneurs from around the world.
TeachAIDS Founder and CEO, Dr. Piya Sorcar, was invited to give a Keynote address. The other Keynote speakers included Vinod Khosla, Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems and Founder of Khosla Ventures; Guy Kawasaki, bestselling author and Silicon Valley venture capitalist; Douglas Leone, Partner at Sequoia Capital; Max Levchin, Founder and CEO of Slide; and JB Straubel, CTO and Founding Member at Tesla Motors. Aside from the keynotes, dozens of leading entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley were brought together to be judges, speakers, and business workshop leaders at the four-day conference.
The 100 most talented young entrepreneurs were selected from 67 schools and over 28 countries to attend this all-expense paid trip to Stanford University for E-Bootcamp training. The four-day event was designed to guide the entrepreneurs through a series of workshops, panels, and talks to help shape their big ideas and business plans. Considered the most selective international entrepreneurship conference, E-Bootcamp ends with the young entrepreneurs pitching their business plans to a panel of judges.
The conference was sponsored by dozens of reputable companies including Business Today, American Airlines, Yahoo!, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Highland Capital Partners, You Noodle, and Goldman Sachs.
Lee County Health Educator Neryda Greene first discovered TeachAIDS online and sought to utilize the materials to educate youth in the Lee County community. As Lee County moved through the process of reviewing the materials, it also coordinated with the Florida Department of Health, which approved the use of the materials in the county’s HIV/AIDS and STD classes.
Lee County is home to a diverse and rapidly growing population. Unfortunately, recent studies have shown that the area suffers from a high rate of HIV infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state of Florida had the second highest rate of AIDS diagnoses in 2009. A study by the Florida Department of Health showed that Lee County has a high HIV and AIDS rate among particular population groups. One in every 123 men in the state is living with HIV, and Lee County ranks eighth in the state for Black men who are HIV positive, with one in every 52 Black men in the county living with HIV.
The Lee County Health Department, whose devoted staff has been recognized as a leader in health outreach, provides HIV and AIDS prevention, testing, care, and education services throughout the county. TeachAIDS is proud to be a part of their effort to provide preventive education to the Lee County community.
As the global presence of TeachAIDS continues to expand, we are also working to ensure that our materials are easily accessible to educators and health professionals in the United States. Thanks to the Formal partnership between TeachAIDS and the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), TeachAIDS materials are available for free across all 50 states.
Youth gather at a school in Cyanika to watch the TeachAIDS animations
A power outage did not deter passionate leaders from bringing the TeachAIDS software to local youth. Armed with a projector, the educators had planned to showcase the TeachAIDS special language version on the wall of a local school. However, despite the power outage, the educators were determined that the show must go on. They used a laptop on a chair to display the animations and improve knowledge among children in their communities.
Comfort My People (CMP) and Village Makeover (VMO) combined efforts to provide critical HIV prevention information to more than 1000 children using the TeachAIDS Kinyarwanda Animated Software. CMP and VMO are NGOs that work together to improve agriculture, education, economic growth, and health in Cyanika, Rwanda, a region located approximately 38 miles northwest of Kigali, close to the Ugandan border in Rwanda’s Western Province.
This was the first of many sessions to come. Over 90 churches in Cyanika will be using the TeachAIDS software through a “Training of Trainers Model” to empower health workers in their congregations. Over the next year, their target is to train and share the TeachAIDS materials with more than 20,000-25,000 church attendees.
The religious leaders in Cyanika noted that for years they have wanted to provide comprehensive HIV prevention education, however felt they lacked the appropriate tools to do so. For the first time, they feel they have found a way to provide youth with knowledge in a way that is culturally-sensitive, biologically-accurate, and optimizes comfort and learning.
"I listened three times because I wanted to make sure I had the facts before the presentation. What I like is that it is a platform that anyone can use to teach from. In the churches, if they want to emphasize remaining pure, they can do so from this video. But everyone gets a whole message.” - Willy Rumenera, President of Comfort My People
TeachAIDS is partnered with numerous other organizations in Rwanda, including CARE International, Gardens for Health, and FACE AIDS, to educate hundreds of Rwandan youth using a “Training of Trainers Model”. During the 2010 FIFA World Cup games, TeachAIDS animations were shown to thousands of Rwandan soccer fans on the jumbotron screen of the Gisenyl Stadium in between several matches.
Photo: Youth gather at a school in Cyanika to watch the TeachAIDS animations
Students gather in small classroom to receive prevention education through the TeachAIDS software
In a small, rural farm community of approximately 500 people located in the Hardap Region, residents live several hours away from the nearest town in Namibia. In this community, secondary school volunteer teachers sought TeachAIDS materials after recognizing that the link between awareness and knowledge gains were broken. While students were aware of basic HIV and AIDS related facts, many misconceptions and rumors were rampant.
“In my community, the learners are generally aware and educated about HIV/AIDS, but there are many myths about the disease that the school curriculum does not address. These range from things like ‘HIV was brought to Africa by Americans’ to really damaging myths like ‘sex with a virgin can cure HIV’. The challenge then is providing very clear information to help dispel rumors.” – Caitlin Roake, Peace Corps Volunteer
In order to provide culturally-acceptable, medically-accurate, and interactive HIV and AIDS education, volunteers have integrated the TeachAIDS tutorials into the life skills and life sciences curriculum.
Within several workshops, dozens of sixth through ninth standard students received HIV education from a TeachAIDS tutorial projected onto a screen in the center of the classroom. Due to these successes, Peace Corps Volunteers sought to expand the use of TeachAIDS materials in Namibia. In the coming months, Teach AIDS materials will be distributed to approximately 115 volunteers working in rural and urban sites in all 13 regions of Namibia. These volunteers will work towards implementing TeachAIDS education materials into after-school HIV and AIDS workshops and community programs. In addition, Peace Corps Volunteers will provide Namibian counterparts with TeachAIDS materials and help them to integrate the materials into their own classroom teaching efforts.
The United States Peace Corps currently serves 68 countries around the world and has provided over 1200 volunteers to serve Namibia since the program’s inception in 1990. With support from the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), HIV and AIDS extension volunteers in Namibia educate individuals about prevention in health clinics, community centers, and in the classroom. These outreach efforts are particularly important in a nation such as Namibia, which maintains one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world, with approximately 15% of the population infected.
Over the past two years, TeachAIDS and Peace Corps Volunteers have collaborated to deliver HIV prevention education to nations around the world, including Belize, Costa Rica, Dominica, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Lesotho, Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, and Zambia. In Guyana, volunteers incorporated techniques for working with special needs children. In Guatemala, volunteers are collaborating with the Ministry of Health to distribute hundreds of copies of the TeachAIDS animations to
train health professionals across communities.
We look forward to continuing to support the United States Peace Corps and other grassroots organizations in Namibia and throughout Sub-Saharan Africa as we work towards educating individuals about HIV prevention.
Photo: Students gather in small classroom to receive prevention education through the TeachAIDS software
The Rural Women Development Center (RUWDEC) brings TeachAIDS to students in Buea, Cameroon.
The Rural Women Development Center (RUWDEC) combined efforts with local schools to educate dozens of students about HIV prevention in Buea, Cameroon. RUWDEC is local non-governmental organization that operates in the Southwest region of Cameroon. RUWDEC seeks to promote and enhance economic growth through social organization, project development, community health management, natural resource management, information technology, training and appropriate land use. In addition, the NGO provides critical HIV and AIDS information through education sessions for young people in schools and communities.
Nelly Shella, an educator with RUWDEC, implemented an HIV education workshop attended by dozens of students between the ages of 9 and 15. Students gathered during their club period to learn this critical prevention information. The instructors played the TeachAIDS software on a classroom computer screen, as students crowded on chairs and on the floor to learn together. As the animations progressed, youth in attendance expressed their enthusiasm for the materials. The educators then facilitated an extended discussion with their learners, as they engaged in discourse around how to protect themselves and their communities from further infection.
“The TeachAIDS animative program has been a great tool to facilitate discussions on HIV/AIDS. It was highly appreciated by youths, as they got engaged in discussions and expressed their feeling of how this program has helped them to better understand HIV/AIDS,” said Nelly Shella, an educator with RUWDEC. “The blend of this material with other training materials gives a perfect outreach package. [The students] were particularly impressed by the use of the triangle test to illustrate the various modes of transmission.”
As a result of the workshop’s success, the Rural Women Development Center (RUWDEC) will implement TeachAIDS materials into future educational campaigns, including World AIDS Day programming and their Youth4AIDS program.
TeachAIDS commends the efforts of these passionate educators for arming local youth with the much needed tools to improve human health.
Photo: The Rural Women Development Center (RUWDEC) brings TeachAIDS to students in Buea, Cameroon.
