Cellphone Learning Program Wins Award

November 28, 2010 | Read Time: 1 minute

The Tech Museum of Innovation, in San Jose, Calif., has presented its annual awards honoring the creative use of technology to benefit societies around the world.

The BBC World Service Trust, the BBC’s international-development charity, won the education award for BBC Janala, a service that offers audio English lessons via cellphone to people in Bangladesh at a cost of less than 1.5 cents per minute.

Other nonprofit winners:

Blue Planet Network, a nonprofit group in Redwood City, Calif., won the environment award for the Peer Water Exchange, an online network that allows development groups, grant makers, and donors to share best practices in water and sanitation.
A Single Drop for Safe Water, an organization in Puerto Princesa City, Philippines, won the equality award for establishing local, self-supporting service centers that help communities design, build, and maintain low-cost water and sanitation services.

Each award carries a $50,000 cash prize.

For more information: Go to http://www.techawards.org.

About the Author

NICOLE WALLACE

Features Editor

Nicole Wallace is features editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has written about innovation in the nonprofit world, charities’ use of data to improve their work and to boost fundraising, advanced technologies for social good, and hybrid efforts at the intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, such as social enterprise and impact investing.Nicole spearheaded the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast and reported from India on the role of philanthropy in rebuilding after the South Asian tsunami. She started at the Chronicle in 1996 as an editorial assistant compiling The Nonprofit Handbook.Before joining the Chronicle, Nicole worked at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and served in the inaugural class of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.A native of Columbia, Pa., she holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.