Source: http://www.www.istockanalyst.com/
IBM has selected 11 organisations from different parts of the world for the $1 million Smarter Planet grants. IBM Centennial Grants are offered as both monetary and in-kind awards up to US $100,000 each for innovative projects in areas such as healthcare, energy and food safety. The organisations that have been selected for the IBM awards are not-for-profit organisations and educational institutions operating in different parts of the world.
“Non profit and education organizations are the lifeblood of local communities, and we want to help them by offering support to build a smarter planet,” said Stanley S. Litow, vice president of corporate citizenship and corporate affairs at IBM. “In conjunction with our employees making their skills available through massive volunteer efforts, IBM’s Centennial grants will help non profits and educational organizations meet their key goals.”
IBM has recently completed a Celebration of Service Day, a milestone in its year-long commitment to skills based volunteering. Over 300,000 IBM employees participated in the event and donated about 2.7 million hours of service time at 5,000 large scale activities, serving over 10 million people on just one day, which represented the largest activity of its kind. The organizations of the IBM Centennial grant recipients collaborated with significantly large numbers of IBM volunteers during the Celebration of Service Day.
ATN Telecentre Information and Business Association ( Brazil) and Drishtee Foundation are among the IBM Centennial grant recipients.
Research has demonstrated that lack of technology is one of the main reasons non profit organizations and small and medium enterprises fail to survive in Latin America. This grant will help create a smarter network of non profits in Latin America including the creation of a toolkit for non profit organizations, and small and medium size businesses, to influence public policy and enable economic development.
Similarly, rural India is on the wrong side of the Digital Divide financially and socially deprived by a lack of access to critical information and technology leading to a big gap in opportunities. This grant will fund a Smart Rural Aggregation Platform which will help create Drishtee’s model villages into a sustainable Smarter Villages in rural India.
