Annual Report 2015

Flat Version

In 2015, ST Foundation emphasized its attention in maximizing the efficacy and efficiency of its key program, the Digital Unify, which has the goal to help bridge the digital divide: the gap between those who have access, and those who do not, to modern digital technologies. The Digital Unify offered free computer access and training to 327.189 beneficiaries since its inception and as of 2015.

 2015 Milestones and Report Summary:

• Update on DU
• The axis of DU strategy: South-Saharan Africa and ST countries
• The ST Foundation fundraising strategy
• The ST Foundation communication activity
• Launch of the Digital Unify For Kids (DU4K) Program In India
• Planning the Digital Unify For Kids (DU4K) Program in Morocco
• 100.000 ceremony at the ST plant of Bouskoura
• Online data reporting system
• New MOU with the Municipality of Casablanca
• ST Foundation’s expansion activity
• DU pictures
• Update on DU: 2015 a year of achievements.

The program grew steadily along the year in both ST and non ST Countries. Brazil and Germany became fully operational in 2015. Malaysia was added to the list of operational countries and became active in Q42015. In addition the Foundation signed two Conventions of collaboration to add Ethiopia and Haiti to the intervention areas; the courses will be cascaded in the first semester of 2016.

Since the inception of the program, we trained 327.189 trainees.

Digital Unify Program: over 320.000  Trainees since 2003

• The ST Foundation fundraising strategy

The ST Foundation launched its fundraising activity in June 2014 with the collaboration of a specialized Swiss agency:  Ethika. The mission of this organization is to support “not for profit” entities to develop a fundraising strategy. After the first mandate of a 6 months period, done with the scope of prospecting new sources of revenues towards Swiss public authorities and donor foundations in Switzerland, the Foundation signed a second mandate of 6 months devoted to train the Operations Consultant on fundraising techniques.

Two major projects were presented to: 1) launch the DU program in Haiti; 2) and reinforce the STFoundation presence in Congo DR and Burundi. As of December 31 the Foundation raised 15.000 CHF. In 2016 the Foundation will evaluate if and how fundraising activities will be continued.

• The ST Foundation communication activity

The cooperation between the ST Foundation, and the ST Corporate External Communication team continues along the year. Thanks to this collaboration the 2014 Annual Report devoted to inform the public of the ongoing activity was issued and distributed internally and externally to better illustrate our activities in the intervention areas.

The Foundation received also a precious support in the preparation of the communication material for the 100.000 ceremony organized in Morocco.

• Launch of the Digital Unify For Kids (DU4K) Program in India

In 2015 the ST Foundation has been working on the creation of a new informatics course for children aged 9 up to preadolescents aged 14, with very different cultural backgrounds and socio-economic conditions, living in very diverse context, from urban to semi-urban and rural.

The goals of the course are:

1.to provide children with intuitive understanding of the potential of ICTs as means for problem solving and personal development.

2.to help children to develop basic ICT skills in writing, math and information literacy.

The overall objective is that children can finish the course with a tangible enthusiasm about the possibilities opened up by the mastery of technology.

Thus, the supreme concern of the educators must be to help cultivate a positive attitude towards the use of ICTs as a means for empowerment and emancipation from ignorance and poverty.

For the finalization of this new learning tool, the Foundation partnered with a Swiss organization, seed, that was in charge to develop the  content of the course and the innovative pedagogical approach.

The course was tested in two schools in India, in a rural area 200 km north of New Delhi. Pietro Fox followed directly the pilot phase with a two weeks mission in April.

The feedback from these pilot runs was then used to finalize the content of the Educator Handbook.

In October we have begun the cascading phase, signing 5 conventions of collaboration with: Public Inter College, Doiwala, Dehradun District, Uttarakhand; Foster & Forge Foundation, Noida, U.P; Arya Inter College, Dist. Haridwar, Uttarakhand; Pt. Salag Ram Inter College Habibpur, Greater Noida, Gautam Budh Nagar, U.P., , Navjyoti India Foundation – Delhi.

• Planning the Digital Unify For Kids (DU4K) Program in Morocco

Base on the very good result of the Indian experience the STFoundation decided to expand the new program devoted to children to further country. The first one will be Morocco.

On September 25 the Foundation signed a preliminary MOU with the Delegation de l’Education Nationale to spread the DU4Kids in the country and precisely in the Benguerir Region.

The agreement covers a test phase from Q4 2015 to Q1 2016. During this period, the Foundation will develop and deliver the course, together with the list of necessary equipment, while the partner supports the cost of the equipment, appoints the project coordinator, selects the pilot classes and identifies the teachers and assistants. A pilot run, supervised by “seed”, will be held in two school in Q1 2016.The final agreement will be signed in the second part of 2016 on the base of the achieved results and it envisages the deployment of the course in 50 schools the Region.

• 100.000 ceremony at the ST plant of Bouskoura

On May 7, at the ST site of Bouskoura the ST Foundation celebrated the 100.000th beneficiary in Morocco of its society-empowering Digital Unify (DU) program.

Over the past twelve years, the ST Foundation has developed the DU program through 43 cities and smaller villages, covering 12 regions across Morocco, making the country one of the most active and successful in the DU program.

This achievement was been made possible with the help of key supporters like:

1. Primarily STMicroelectronics which, on top of the initial financing of the Foundation, provides most of the labs’ material and encourages its employees to participate to the Foundation’s activities;
2. All organizations, schools, municipalities, public organizations with which the ST Foundation have signed partnership agreements;
3. More than 350 trainers that have been intervening in Morocco since the beginning of the program.

In order to thank all the key actors of our program and to celebrate the over 100.000 people trained in the country, the ST Foundation decided to organize a dedicated ceremony. Pietro Fox and Patrice Chastagner welcomed the guests presenting the Foundation, the present activity and the vision for the future.

Philippe Brun (Corporate Vice President, Human Resources & Sustainable Development) illustrated the sustainability strategy of STMicroelectronics and the connection with the mission of the Foundation. The ceremony ended with a recognition moment for those actors who did their best for supporting our mission (trainers, partners, ST volunteers and suppliers) and with a visit to the Idriss 1st lab to give a concrete example of the DU program showing the result of an excellent team work activity.

• Online data reporting system.

The STFoundation has been working on the implementation of a real time data collecting system in order to have the possibility of monitoring the DU Courses held worldwide on a daily basis.

Davide Brambilla, ST employee and volunteer of the STFoundation, designed the whole system and worked with the support of the local representatives to its implementation and continuous improvement.

The final result has been conceived to be the key tool to verify the progresses of the operations throughout  the world. The system has been tested in the second half of the year and will become fully operational and mandatory by January 1, 2016.

The system has proved to have multiple beneficial effects and namely to:

1. Guarantee a stable control on the activity giving the possibility of implementing corrective actions, if needed, in real time.
2. Verify the status of our centers throughout the world, indicating for instance if internet (key tool for our courses) is well functioning or if we have low performance trainers.
3. Gather important statistics and information regarding the participants of our courses, giving also a feedback on the quality of the course we propose.

• New MOU with the Municipality of Casablanca

The last quarter of the year the ST Foundation started a new partnership with the Municipality of Casablanca, the largest city on Morocco with more than 2 million habitants The target for the coming year is to create the so called “ smart city” reaching all the people that have no access to Informatics and with it to all those possibilities it can be offered through it.

The first step of the collaboration has been the organization of a train the trainers session in November, 25 to train the teachers that will start working in the following centers: Library in the Mers Sultan District; Library in the Hay Hassani District; Library in the Sbata District; Library in the Ben M’sik District.

The equipment for these first four centers, founded by STFoundation, was in loco by the end of the year.

The municipality of Casablanca has committed to train more than 1200 people in ach centers per year. If the first phase of the collaboration the project will meet our goals, other 30 centers will be set up, covering all the urban area of Casablanca.

• ST Foundation’s expansion activity

In February Mauro Decca and Tafsir Diop organized a one week mission to Senegal for the following scopes: presenting the shared strategy to lead the partners to become gradually independent from the economic funding of the Foundation after the first 6 years of cooperation (the idea of the Informatics Service Center was proposed as a possible solution); visiting of all the centers that were set-up with our partner CNID to audit them, to verify the conditions of the equipment and to gather their feedback on how to pass to the second phase of the collaboration with the Foundation; organizing a meeting with Mr. Dieng, the new Director of Anpej; and organizing a meeting with GIF (our maintenance service supplier) to evaluate its offer to introduce a package of advanced courses.

In February Patrice Chastagner and Giovanna Bottani organized a one week mission to Morocco. They were accompanied by Luca Pacifici, professional photographer the STFoundation communication agency gave for free to prepare good communication tools to launch the image of the Foundation locally and internationally.

The key scopes of the mission were, in fact, to: organize the “100.000 ceremony” that took place on May 7 at Bouskoura ST Plant; to gather the key needed communication material visiting eight computer centers well selected to be representative of the activity in the country; meet strategic partners like the representatives of the Ministry of Interior and Rhamna Foundation;  meet Tectra to evaluate new work contracts that could improve the retention of our trainers; organize an operation review with Houmad Boukdir to review the status of our overall program in the country.

In March, Pietro Fox, Mauro Decca, Giovanna Bottani and Enrico Riva visited the ST Plant in Catania to: make a presentation to its top managers on the activities of the ST Foundation to relaunch the DU program locally and  thank the site as it has been the best donator of laptops with more than 200 units in the last 3 years.

In April Ruben Sonnino visited Brazil for a 4 days mission to: organize a train the trainer course with our local partner starting the deployment of the program; and discuss further opportunities of development in the country with AVSI, our local partner.

In April, Renato Sirtori visited the plant of Muar in Malaysia to make a presentation to the local Management and to launch a local community of the ST Foundation volunteers. The relaunch of the activity in the country  was then completed by the organization of a train the trainers course in August with the support of Chhavi BAJPAI and Kamal Deep Jain who trained 16 ST volunteers.

In September René Munyembari, the STFoundation representative for the activity in Burundi, went to South Sudan for a week mission in order to: evaluate of equipment’ status, repairing it when needed in the 5 labs present in the country (4 in Juba and 1 in Torit); introduce the on Online Reporting System during a new train the trainers session.

In October Patrice Chastagner and Giovanna Bottani planned a 4 days field mission in Morocco in order to: organize the usual operations review with our local representative, Houmad Boukdir and to introduce Farah Arron, the new resource the STFoundation hired locally, to our key partners and collaborators; meet the representatives of Rhamna Foundation and the project manager responsible for the deployment of the DU4Kids Project to finalize the operational details of the pilot phase; meet the representatives of the City of Casablanca to  define the tentative action plan to set-up the first 4 labs; plan the launch of an internal communication initiative to reactivate a local community in the ST plant of Bouskoura.

In November Enrico Riva, organized a two weeks mission to Sierra Leone to: evaluate the existing labs and equipment after more than a year of program’s suspension because of the Ebola pandemic; meet AFCOM, the local internet provider, to discuss about the centers set up in partnerships with the STFoundation and for which internet is given free of charge; set-up 4 new labs and namely: Harford Secondary School for Girls, Christ the King College (CKC), Methodist High School, and IAMTEC; boost the adoption of the online reporting system.

In November Mauro Decca and Tafsir Diop organized a week mission in Senegal to: meet Mr. Dacosta, former responsible for the deployment of the DU program at the CNID, to assure a smooth transition to the appointed new manager; and meet Mr. Dieng to boost the program that faced slowdowns along the year due to the internal reorganization of  the ANPEJ.

Alain Dutheil along the year supported the relaunch of the DU program in France visiting the key plants in the country, namely: Tours, Rousset, Paris and Crolles.

During the visits Mr. Dutheil presented the key activities of the Foundation in order to create new local communities of volunteers that can help the expansion of the DU Program.

One first result was that our ST Montrouge location has joined the Montrouge Project (contre la fracture numérique) which will federate 9 organizations, including ST and the city of Montrouge.

In December Renato Sirtori visited ST Thailand in order to prepare the set-up of a local community and look for potential DU Lab sites.

The resonance was very good, Cholada Roikrong ( in charge of HR and Administration of Thailand Office ) has accepted to be the local coordinator of the STFoundation Volunteers.

• DU Pictures[metaslider id=4233]