State of TechChange 2014
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So long, 2014! Building on our annual posts in 2013 and 2012 (as well as a repeat performance at FailFest 2014!), we wanted to share a few highlights from our year, as well as appreciation for our amazing learning community, partners, and staff.
TechChange continues to flourish as a social enterprise. Our DC-based and recently re-certified B-Corp recently outgrew our old location near Capitol South and moved to U St. We welcomed new team members including Sara Pitcairn, Kendra Keith, Delanie Ricketts, Yohan Perera, Samita Thapa, and Liang Cai. We also launched a fellowship program for college students and recent graduates to apply their programming skills to social change, just like our junior programmers in 2014: Oscar Chen and Sean Bae.
This progress has been thanks to our new partnerships and growing learning community. We’ve partnered to create over 15 self-paced courses on topics such as scaling HIV prevention with A&PI Wellness Center, a free two-hour self-paced course on mobile data solutions with USAID and FHI360, and eight modules on NGO management with Creative Associates International. For our own open enrollment courses, we’ve welcomed 680 students in 13 facilitated four-week sessions, as well as launching two new topics in 3D Printing for Social Good and Technology for Monitoring and Evaluation.
To complement these courses, we’ve created powerful educational content, including 45 total minutes of beautiful animations for projects by Search for Common Ground, Feed the Future, and more. (Watch our new animation reel to get an idea.) We’ve also tried to end boring PDFs and open up reports with our Organizational Guide to ICT4D.
Underpinning all of this has been the extensive improvements developed by our tech team. We launched a new user and course management system that now has 2,461 users and 72 courses. We also provided white-labeled platforms for 8 organizations including USAID, TOL, MAMA, URC, THNK, Ashoka, A&PI, and more. Stay tuned for new offerings in the space of educational technology for development as a service.
TechChange has also invested in public communications, as we’ve grown to 12,500 followers on Twitter, revamped our YouTube channel and launched a weekly educational email series. We’ve also been recognized in publications such as Forbes and the the Guardian, while our staff have received received awards and nominations from 50 on Fire, Arianne de Rothschild, and Society for International Development. We also had opportunities to participate in Tech@State, SwitchPoint, the Action Summit, Swarthmore College, and M&E Tech.
But the most exciting development has been the initiatives undertaken by our alumni, including mHealth Apps for HIV, convening meetups in Zambia, finding jobs for alumni, and health mapping in Uganda. That’s why we’ve been happy to convene gatherings with General Assembly and Udemy, sponsored a team of Kosovo youth social entrepreneurs, and hosted the TechGirls #jobshadowday again!
