The Creative Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
CC Attribution - ShareAlike 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor and the work or content is shared also in adapted form only under the conditions of this
Daniel, Ruth
What if: education was an ecosystem? the most isolated people in the world could connect, learn and inspire? your classroom was one day in Brazil and the next in Uganda? your peers became your educators? you have an ever-evolving living bank of resources? you could connect directly to those you want to inspire you? you have a creative currency that facilitates creative trade across the world? the ecosystem not only helped provide new tools and connections, but inspired new models about how you bring up your children, how you live and how you work? We have redesigned the way people can not only learn, but work together, across boarders in the most marginalised communities in the...
 Hi, everybody. Good afternoon. Hope you're having a good Republic. So, yeah, my name is Ruth and I'm the co-director of an organisation called In Place of War. In Place of War works around the world in some of the most marginal communities using arts and creativity to make change in those communities and bring opportunities for local people across the world. Our work started with a question and the question was do people make art when bombs are dropping on their heads? And this work started back in 2004. So, for the past just under a decade and a half, we've been looking at how arts is used in these communities, why people make art at these times. So, I'm here today to talk about education and the role of creative education in communities at conflict. What we found, particularly in the most marginalised and poorest communities across the world, is that the provision of education is very low. But this actually has fed back and made us think about education across the whole of the world and thinking about whether the education systems in place work. But before I talk about that, I want to quickly tell you three things that you probably don't know about. So, I'm going to tell you three short stories. I want you to meet Benny. Benny is a hip hop artist based in the north of Uganda, in the war-torn area of Uganda, in Chitgum. Benny is a hip hop artist and along with 15 other hip hop artists, he has a farm. He keeps bees and he makes produce. And the profit that he makes from the produce that he sells enables him to go into the local prison and work with prisoners with hip hop, arts, creativity, culture and transform the opportunities for the inmates, meaning that they don't return to prison after they leave and meaning that this improves the whole life within the community. The second person I want to talk about is Picky. Picky is based in a place called El Val, a neighbourhood in Caracas in Venezuela. Picky runs an organisation called Tuna El Fuerte. Tuna El Fuerte is a collection of 100 converted shipping containers which make this incredible cultural space deep in the heart of the neighbourhood. Inside this space you'll find theatre spaces, music studios, dance spaces and every week 500 young people go into this space, taking them away from violent alternatives in their neighbourhood. So, it has this incredible social impact. And the third person I want to introduce you to is Sara Fernandez. Sara is based in Beirut and she runs an organisation called Creative Space Beirut. Their slogan is make designers not clothes. She goes into the Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon and finds women who are very marginalised, women from obviously the most poor communities in Lebanon. And she takes these women who have had no experience with fashion design and making and trains them in all the skills so they can make fashion ranges and clothes. These clothes sell for tens of thousands of dollars and the profit enables them to work with more women every year, giving them skills and enabling them to set up their own creative enterprises. Now why have I told you about these three things? So, these three things you might not find on an education syllabus or a curriculum. You might not even find them on the internet. These are three examples from kind of isolated communities or people working with isolated communities. But these three people have taught me more about the world than I ever learned at school, than I ever learned at college. So, I'm talking about education and I'm talking about today what is lacking from our systems of education. And I'll come back to these three people at the end of the presentation. When I started thinking about this talk, I actually started thinking about the context of education, the history of education. And I thought, I'll do the thing that everyone does and I'll get a dictionary definition. And it's kind of shocked to read the dictionary definition of education. It's the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at school or university. And when we think about how we all learned when we were younger, it probably looked something not dissimilar to this. A big building with classrooms inside, with desks where people would sit behind the desks. And a teacher, usually older than the students, would do that giving of systematic instruction. And as I travel around the world, as I do with my work, I see this format of education pretty much everywhere that I go. They say that education is supposed to prepare us for the workplace. And I found this picture which looks very similar to the first picture. And I guess that maybe a long time ago, education did just that. It prepared us for a workplace. But perhaps things have changed now. So does education work with the jobs that we now do? My experience of education was both good and bad. My history lessons were kind of probably the bad bit of my education. My teacher was called Miss Ellis and I'm going to name and shame her. Every week, we would go to the history lesson and she would have a book, and we would also have this book. And she would dictate passages from the book to us and we would write down what she said. For two hours a week, every week for three years. That was my history. And I think as we move around the world, we see particularly in the poorer communities that I work in, where education is often a colonial import, that Miss Ellis is an example of how learning happens is the norm. And this worries me because I've just come back from Uganda. And this worries me because people are not learning how to use their minds, how to think critically or analytically about the world that we all live in. The world has changed exponentially over the past 100 years. From how we access information, from having to have a physical book to now online, digital tools, having tablets, to how we do our work, to how we interact with people, to how we live our lives, everything has changed. But the way that we receive information, as we receive education, has received pretty much the same. There's a saying that you can teach somebody to fish and you can feed them for a lifetime. But what if we could teach people how to make the fishing rods about the ecosystem in the lake, about how they can sell their fish, both in their community and beyond? What about if education was more than just the basics that we receive in school? So, with my organization in place of war, we've been looking to see how we can work with the most marginalized communities in the world, and these are all the people that we work with, and there's many, many more, and understand how education should be right now. So we've been through a process over the past decade and a half. What we started off by doing is taking experts into marginalized communities with the idea of them training people. Quite simple. Take the most successful entrepreneur in fashion into a community that's working with textiles. See what happens. But what we found was really, really shocked us. Actually, the experts that we were taking to the communities were coming away learning more than the people based in those communities. And that made us think, actually, all knowledge is valid. Just because you're based in the West and you're a millionaire, it doesn't actually mean that you know more than people who are living in marginalized communities. We found that the most remarkable innovations were happening in communities with the least resources. Of course they are. People have to innovate to survive every single day. So what people know in those communities are lessons that can be learned everywhere in the world. One of the things that I learned last year was this idea of learning and unlearning. So I was in South Africa and a woman said to me, every day I wake up and I learn, but I also unlearn. And she was talking about the apartheid education system which told her that her culture was not valid, that her language was not valid. And this had been systematically put inside her brain. To the point where she started to believe this as a young black woman. So every day she woke up and she was having to unravel that and unlearn that, which I found really fascinating. We also learned that borders are not a barrier anymore. In the past, I guess, people from the UK, from Europe could go and deliver education in maybe African countries. But actually what wasn't happening was that people from Zimbabwe were learning from people in Uganda because of access and resources and so on. But now with digital tools and mobile technology, the potential for people to interact within across the continent is much more powerful and much more possible. We also learned, and it's very obvious, that the world continues to change. And therefore education should not be static and stationary. It should be continually evolving and responding to everything that's happening around it. And we also learned that there are no wrong answers. Everybody holds valid knowledge. Everybody should be able to participate and introduce their ideas regardless of who they are, where they're from, and so on. So we started to think what if education was an ecosystem? When I think about the communities that we work with, and we all saw the picture of all those remarkable young people, when I see the way they work together in their everyday lives in their community, it is like an ecosystem. And the dictionary definition of ecosystem is a biological community of interacting organisms. It's not linear. It's not giving. It's not receiving. It's all of these things interacting with each other. So we started thinking what if education was an ecosystem? And it looked like this, which is beautiful. What if the most isolated people on the planet could start to learn from each other, connect with each other, inspire each other? What if one day your classroom was in South Africa and the next day it was in Brazil? This is a photograph of some of the work we do, and the guy on the screen is in Brazil. The other guys are in South Africa. What if your peers became your educators? You were learning from other people your age, like you, doing the same things as you? What if you could create an ever-evolving, living bank of resources? So the curriculum wasn't just set, that we do this, and then we do this, and then we do this. Actually, some guys in Palestine were introducing their ideas into this system. And then some other guys in Venezuela, and it was building, and you had this great bank of resources. And what if you could connect directly with the people in the world who inspire you the most and start to really have those conversations with the people that you want to work with? And along with all of that, what if you could create some kind of creative currency around this, which formalized people working together? So you're in Uganda, you want to make a project, or you want to make something that you've learned, a reality, with someone in Brazil, you can maybe make a formal way of doing that. And what if education happened beyond the classroom? And actually, it was part of everybody's everyday life. So it was about how you bring up your children, exploring different methodologies and ways of doing that, about how you work with your family, about countering challenges around mental health and other challenges in society. So in place of war, we created, accidentally and organically, this kind of community. And it's about we created a creative and social entrepreneurial program. So an education program that we devised with 40 countries across the world. So the program started off with the basics of social entrepreneurship, creative entrepreneurship, but we didn't want it to be a load of British people saying this is how you do it, because it's not applicable. It doesn't work when you go to Uganda. So what we did is we asked people mostly from the global south who are innovators, who are creators, who are making amazing things happen with limited resources. We created 800 real life living resources, videos, illustrations that you've seen and all these kind of things. And we asked people to continue to add to it so it's growing all of the time. So it has elements of social and creative enterprise. And around the delivery of this, everyone who participates as a trainer, so we train trainers in different parts of the world, and then they take it into their communities, which could be a refugee camp, could be all sorts of settings. And then people connect afterwards online. So this community of people is starting to happen across the world. So I was in Palestine two weeks ago, delivering the training in West Bank. I was in Uganda just last week. Those people are now connecting with each other. And what we really wanted to do was say, actually, this education is important, and it's different, and it looks different to any kind of university education, but we want a university to back this. So participants in the program receive a certificate from the world leading university, the University of Manchester, which means so much given that the people we're delivering it to might be a refugee who has had no formal traditional education at all. So it's hugely powerful. So I guess we started innovating with our limited resources, and we began mobilizing creative people to try and make change in this way. We made the world our classroom. It hasn't got the walls that we see around us. It's everywhere. And we broke down those walls, and the students and the teachers now became one and the same thing. Knowledge then becomes fluid, and we ourselves started to learn and unlearn how education can work. And it's been a really powerful journey, because it's so inspirational, and it's so true, the people that we work with in the different contexts. Every time we do the work, we learn loads, and they're learning from each other, and it is totally in a non-traditional way. And most importantly, we started responding to the technological environment, environmental and social changes in our world, using what's around us to make education happen in places where it doesn't. So what free tools can we use to make these things happen? And because of this, I think the possibilities are endless. There are so many people who miss out because of lack of education, but so many people who have incredible talent. The classroom then, I guess, looks less like this and more like these examples of how people can learn. Outside on the streets, in houses, collective houses across Brazil, and in different settings in communities across the world. So this is a picture last two days ago, three days ago, in Uganda. We train people from Congo, Tanzania, South Sudan, and across Uganda. Cultural leaders who are working in communities. These people will take all of these ideas, they will add to the ideas, and they will deliver it to hundreds and hundreds of people in their communities. Then they form networks, so everybody starts to connect with each other. So people who never would have had education opportunities have got an opportunity to learn from people right across the world, using new methodologies to bring change in their context. So far, we've delivered and evaluated the program in 14 countries. It's in multiple languages. We've trained 200 trainers, and they've trained hundreds and hundreds of young people. I think what we've learned so far, and we're right at the beginning of this journey, we only created the program relatively recently. The innovations and knowledge in the program are the inspiration. It's the methodologies, the things that we work with, the people we work with that inspire, and give people hope that they know that other people can make things happen with very limited resources. I think one of the key desires is that people in this system want to be connected. They want to know that other people are out there who can work with them. The whole thing is about democratising education, and I realised this a few days ago. Enabling people in this world who have limited access to resources to education, the ability to access that. It's about alternative and accessible delivery. Going back to the first three people, these three people taught me a lot, and I'm from Manchester in the UK, and had the opportunity to go to school and be educated. For me, what they teach each other, because they're all part of this network, is phenomenal. Then how that can be amplified and created in this ecosystem, the potential is huge. I see education going in the direction of being an ecosystem, and that we should all embrace and join in this idea so that we can help everybody on this planet to receive education inspired by everyone on the planet. Thank you very much. APPLAUSE I don't know if there's time for any questions? Yeah, we have about ten minutes time for questions. So, who has questions, please come to me or to my colleague over there. Come on over. Yes, come on over. You can stand up in a line if you like, and we know how many people want to ask questions. Yeah, thank you. Thanks. Hey, I'm Jonas. I work with a little NGO in Rwanda. I wonder how do you find your people, the people you work with, because I'm wondering, so how do you plug into the existing social structures? Are you trying to build your own education system as a parallel universe sort of, or do you have a way of being a part of there? So, for the past 15 years, we've been working across the world, and networks have been built kind of quite organically. So, where we work in Uganda, we've been working there for about six years. And through a process of, we do a whole bunch of other things as well. So, we build physical, creative spaces, we mobilize people, we do research, all sorts of things. So, we really kind of identify cultural leaders or community leaders. The idea is not to replicate, it's not to go in and do something, it's to enhance or assist people. So, for example, in Uganda, we kind of go through different channels, but we put calls out for people, we have a process of kind of identifying people. So, it would never be to replicate anything, it's only to work with people on the ground. So, in Rwanda, we've done historically a bit of work there, but I would approach someone like your NGO and say, hey, who would be good to work with, and we have conversations and do a little bit of kind of finding out, and then we worked with those organizations. And it might be that the training needs to be modified or that there's elements of it that aren't relevant or contextualized. So, we do a lot of work around that as well to make sure it really works in the different countries. But it would be good to talk to you about your NGO. Any other questions? Hi. Hi. Oh. That's all I think is. Sometimes techniques. Yeah. Thank you for the presentation, for the wonderful job you're doing. Thank you. It might be a little bit naive, but I was just curious how, like, building all these networks and all these amazing opportunities, how you deal with languages, how you connect people, how does this work? So, we have translated the program into different languages. So, we work to train trainers in different places, and we translate the resources into different languages as much as we can afford to do, and depending on where we deliver the work. And where we're working in communities, say, Venezuela, where we build case studies, so we have staff that speak Spanish and so on. So, it's hard, and especially when we're working in, say, African countries where there are many, many local languages in Zimbabwe, Shona, and Nabele, and so on. And I think it's very much about trying to find a way through. I guess the people that we want to reach the most are the people who are the most likely to just speak a local language. And so, in that sense, it's about working with local community leaders who can then help us translate the resources and so on. It's hard, but I think we're managing to kind of get about that, and we work in lots and lots of places that speak lots of languages. Generally there's always someone in the community who speaks English or a kind of European language which is helpful. But yeah, it's still a challenge. Yeah. So one last call for the last question. Come on over. Hi. I'm Ken. I live and work in South Africa. My question is, how did you get the University of Manchester to formally certify these people that might be located in rural villages in very, very hard to connect areas? So my organisation is based partly at the University of Manchester. And when I first took this to them, they said, this is crazy. They were like, this isn't... because they were first of all, they said, okay, where's the money going to come from and so on. And so I talked to them about it in terms of this is kind of a social responsibility, and we talk about widening participation in the university. So actually, this isn't going to be something that the university can monetise, but this is a great thing to do. And the University of Manchester has these beacons of kind of priorities, and one of them is social responsibility. So it fits really well with kind of their vision for the world. And so we went through a process of having this certified, and we also have it accredited. And it took a while, but we made it happen. And I think it's that thing about this has... the university works with lots of people who are obviously very privileged. And this is the end of that spectrum. And it means the university is working with a wider range of people from across society. So I got there in the end. Thanks. Thank you very much. If somebody has a private question for Ruth, I think she will be here or outside. Thank you very much. A great applause for Ruth Daniel.
 Hi, everybody. Good afternoon. Hope you're having a good  Republic. So, yeah, my name is Ruth and I'm the co-director of an organisation called  In Place of War. In Place of War works around the world in some of the most marginal communities  using arts and creativity to make change in those communities and bring opportunities  for local people across the world. Our work started with a question and the question was  do people make art when bombs are dropping on their heads? And this work started back  in 2004. So, for the past just under a decade and a half, we've been looking at how arts  is used in these communities, why people make art at these times. So, I'm here today to  talk about education and the role of creative education in communities at conflict. What  we found, particularly in the most marginalised and poorest communities across the world,  is that the provision of education is very low. But this actually has fed back and made  us think about education across the whole of the world and thinking about whether the  education systems in place work. But before I talk about that, I want to quickly tell  you three things that you probably don't know about. So, I'm going to tell you three  short stories. I want you to meet Benny. Benny is a hip hop artist based in the north of  Uganda, in the war-torn area of Uganda, in Chitgum. Benny is a hip hop artist and along  with 15 other hip hop artists, he has a farm. He keeps bees and he makes produce. And the  profit that he makes from the produce that he sells enables him to go into the local  prison and work with prisoners with hip hop, arts, creativity, culture and transform the  opportunities for the inmates, meaning that they don't return to prison after they leave  and meaning that this improves the whole life within the community. The second person I  want to talk about is Picky. Picky is based in a place called El Val, a neighbourhood  in Caracas in Venezuela. Picky runs an organisation called Tuna El Fuerte. Tuna El Fuerte is a  collection of 100 converted shipping containers which make this incredible cultural space  deep in the heart of the neighbourhood. Inside this space you'll find theatre spaces, music  studios, dance spaces and every week 500 young people go into this space, taking them away  from violent alternatives in their neighbourhood. So, it has this incredible social impact.  And the third person I want to introduce you to is Sara Fernandez. Sara is based in Beirut  and she runs an organisation called Creative Space Beirut. Their slogan is make designers  not clothes. She goes into the Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon and finds  women who are very marginalised, women from obviously the most poor communities in Lebanon.  And she takes these women who have had no experience with fashion design and making  and trains them in all the skills so they can make fashion ranges and clothes. These  clothes sell for tens of thousands of dollars and the profit enables them to work with more  women every year, giving them skills and enabling them to set up their own creative enterprises.  Now why have I told you about these three things? So, these three things you might not  find on an education syllabus or a curriculum. You might not even find them on the internet.  These are three examples from kind of isolated communities or people working with isolated  communities. But these three people have taught me more about the world than I ever learned  at school, than I ever learned at college. So, I'm talking about education and I'm talking  about today what is lacking from our systems of education. And I'll come back to these  three people at the end of the presentation. When I started thinking about this talk, I  actually started thinking about the context of education, the history of education. And  I thought, I'll do the thing that everyone does and I'll get a dictionary definition.  And it's kind of shocked to read the dictionary definition of education. It's the process  of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at school or university. And when  we think about how we all learned when we were younger, it probably looked something  not dissimilar to this. A big building with classrooms inside, with desks where people  would sit behind the desks. And a teacher, usually older than the students, would do  that giving of systematic instruction. And as I travel around the world, as I do with  my work, I see this format of education pretty much everywhere that I go. They say that education  is supposed to prepare us for the workplace. And I found this picture which looks very  similar to the first picture. And I guess that maybe a long time ago, education did  just that. It prepared us for a workplace. But perhaps things have changed now. So does  education work with the jobs that we now do? My experience of education was both good  and bad. My history lessons were kind of probably the bad bit of my education. My teacher was  called Miss Ellis and I'm going to name and shame her. Every week, we would go to the  history lesson and she would have a book, and we would also have this book. And she  would dictate passages from the book to us and we would write down what she said. For  two hours a week, every week for three years. That was my history. And I think as we move  around the world, we see particularly in the poorer communities that I work in, where education  is often a colonial import, that Miss Ellis is an example of how learning happens is the  norm. And this worries me because I've just come back from Uganda. And this worries me  because people are not learning how to use their minds, how to think critically or analytically  about the world that we all live in. The world has changed exponentially over the past 100  years. From how we access information, from having to have a physical book to now online,  digital tools, having tablets, to how we do our work, to how we interact with people,  to how we live our lives, everything has changed. But the way that we receive information,  as we receive education, has received pretty much the same. There's a saying that you  can teach somebody to fish and you can feed them for a lifetime. But what if we could  teach people how to make the fishing rods about the ecosystem in the lake, about how  they can sell their fish, both in their community and beyond? What about if education was more  than just the basics that we receive in school? So, with my organization in place of war,  we've been looking to see how we can work with the most marginalized communities in  the world, and these are all the people that we work with, and there's many, many more,  and understand how education should be right now. So we've been through a process over  the past decade and a half. What we started off by doing is taking experts into marginalized  communities with the idea of them training people. Quite simple. Take the most successful  entrepreneur in fashion into a community that's working with textiles. See what happens. But  what we found was really, really shocked us. Actually, the experts that we were taking  to the communities were coming away learning more than the people based in those communities.  And that made us think, actually, all knowledge is valid. Just because you're based in the  West and you're a millionaire, it doesn't actually mean that you know more than people  who are living in marginalized communities. We found that the most remarkable innovations  were happening in communities with the least resources. Of course they are. People have  to innovate to survive every single day. So what people know in those communities are  lessons that can be learned everywhere in the world. One of the things that I learned  last year was this idea of learning and unlearning. So I was in South Africa and a woman said  to me, every day I wake up and I learn, but I also unlearn. And she was talking about the  apartheid education system which told her that her culture was not valid, that her language  was not valid. And this had been systematically put inside her brain. To the point where  she started to believe this as a young black woman. So every day she woke up and she was  having to unravel that and unlearn that, which I found really fascinating. We also learned  that borders are not a barrier anymore. In the past, I guess, people from the UK, from  Europe could go and deliver education in maybe African countries. But actually what wasn't  happening was that people from Zimbabwe were learning from people in Uganda because of  access and resources and so on. But now with digital tools and mobile technology, the potential  for people to interact within across the continent is much more powerful and much more possible.  We also learned, and it's very obvious, that the world continues to change. And therefore  education should not be static and stationary. It should be continually evolving and responding  to everything that's happening around it. And we also learned that there are no wrong  answers. Everybody holds valid knowledge. Everybody should be able to participate and  introduce their ideas regardless of who they are, where they're from, and so on. So we  started to think what if education was an ecosystem? When I think about the communities  that we work with, and we all saw the picture of all those remarkable young people, when  I see the way they work together in their everyday lives in their community, it is like an ecosystem.  And the dictionary definition of ecosystem is a biological community of interacting  organisms. It's not linear. It's not giving. It's not receiving. It's all of these things  interacting with each other. So we started thinking what if education was an ecosystem?  And it looked like this, which is beautiful. What if the most isolated people on the planet  could start to learn from each other, connect with each other, inspire each other? What  if one day your classroom was in South Africa and the next day it was in Brazil? This is  a photograph of some of the work we do, and the guy on the screen is in Brazil. The other  guys are in South Africa. What if your peers became your educators? You were learning from  other people your age, like you, doing the same things as you? What if you could create  an ever-evolving, living bank of resources? So the curriculum wasn't just set, that we  do this, and then we do this, and then we do this. Actually, some guys in Palestine were  introducing their ideas into this system. And then some other guys in Venezuela, and  it was building, and you had this great bank of resources. And what if you could connect  directly with the people in the world who inspire you the most and start to really have  those conversations with the people that you want to work with? And along with all of that,  what if you could create some kind of creative currency around this, which formalized people  working together? So you're in Uganda, you want to make a project, or you want to make  something that you've learned, a reality, with someone in Brazil, you can maybe make  a formal way of doing that. And what if education happened beyond the classroom? And actually,  it was part of everybody's everyday life. So it was about how you bring up your children,  exploring different methodologies and ways of doing that, about how you work with your  family, about countering challenges around mental health and other challenges in society.  So in place of war, we created, accidentally and organically, this kind of community. And  it's about we created a creative and social entrepreneurial program. So an education program  that we devised with 40 countries across the world. So the program started off with the  basics of social entrepreneurship, creative entrepreneurship, but we didn't want it to  be a load of British people saying this is how you do it, because it's not applicable.  It doesn't work when you go to Uganda. So what we did is we asked people mostly from the  global south who are innovators, who are creators, who are making amazing things happen with  limited resources. We created 800 real life living resources, videos, illustrations that  you've seen and all these kind of things. And we asked people to continue to add to  it so it's growing all of the time. So it has elements of social and creative enterprise.  And around the delivery of this, everyone who participates as a trainer, so we train  trainers in different parts of the world, and then they take it into their communities,  which could be a refugee camp, could be all sorts of settings. And then people connect  afterwards online. So this community of people is starting to happen across the world. So  I was in Palestine two weeks ago, delivering the training in West Bank. I was in Uganda  just last week. Those people are now connecting with each other. And what we really wanted  to do was say, actually, this education is important, and it's different, and it looks  different to any kind of university education, but we want a university to back this. So  participants in the program receive a certificate from the world leading university, the University  of Manchester, which means so much given that the people we're delivering it to might be  a refugee who has had no formal traditional education at all. So it's hugely powerful.  So I guess we started innovating with our limited resources, and we began mobilizing  creative people to try and make change in this way. We made the world our classroom. It hasn't  got the walls that we see around us. It's everywhere. And we broke down those walls,  and the students and the teachers now became one and the same thing. Knowledge then becomes  fluid, and we ourselves started to learn and unlearn how education can work. And it's been  a really powerful journey, because it's so inspirational, and it's so true, the people  that we work with in the different contexts. Every time we do the work, we learn loads,  and they're learning from each other, and it is totally in a non-traditional way. And  most importantly, we started responding to the technological environment, environmental  and social changes in our world, using what's around us to make education happen in places  where it doesn't. So what free tools can we use to make these things happen? And because  of this, I think the possibilities are endless. There are so many people who miss out because  of lack of education, but so many people who have incredible talent. The classroom then,  I guess, looks less like this and more like these examples of how people can learn. Outside  on the streets, in houses, collective houses across Brazil, and in different settings in  communities across the world. So this is a picture last two days ago, three days ago,  in Uganda. We train people from Congo, Tanzania, South Sudan, and across Uganda. Cultural leaders  who are working in communities. These people will take all of these ideas, they will add  to the ideas, and they will deliver it to hundreds and hundreds of people in their communities.  Then they form networks, so everybody starts to connect with each other. So people who  never would have had education opportunities have got an opportunity to learn from people  right across the world, using new methodologies to bring change in their context. So far,  we've delivered and evaluated the program in 14 countries. It's in multiple languages.  We've trained 200 trainers, and they've trained hundreds and hundreds of young people. I think  what we've learned so far, and we're right at the beginning of this journey, we only  created the program relatively recently. The innovations and knowledge in the program  are the inspiration. It's the methodologies, the things that we work with, the people we  work with that inspire, and give people hope that they know that other people can make  things happen with very limited resources. I think one of the key desires is that people  in this system want to be connected. They want to know that other people are out there  who can work with them. The whole thing is about democratising education, and I realised  this a few days ago. Enabling people in this world who have limited access to resources  to education, the ability to access that. It's about alternative and accessible delivery.  Going back to the first three people, these three people taught me a lot, and I'm from  Manchester in the UK, and had the opportunity to go to school and be educated. For me, what  they teach each other, because they're all part of this network, is phenomenal. Then  how that can be amplified and created in this ecosystem, the potential is huge. I see education  going in the direction of being an ecosystem, and that we should all embrace and join in  this idea so that we can help everybody on this planet to receive education inspired  by everyone on the planet. Thank you very much.  APPLAUSE  I don't know if there's time for any questions?  Yeah, we have about ten minutes time for questions. So, who has questions, please come to me  or to my colleague over there. Come on over. Yes, come on over. You can stand up in a line  if you like, and we know how many people want to ask questions.  Yeah, thank you.  Thanks. Hey, I'm Jonas. I work with a little NGO in Rwanda. I wonder how do you find your  people, the people you work with, because I'm wondering, so how do you plug into the existing  social structures? Are you trying to build your own education system as a parallel universe  sort of, or do you have a way of being a part of there?  So, for the past 15 years, we've been working across the world, and networks have been built  kind of quite organically. So, where we work in Uganda, we've been working there for about  six years. And through a process of, we do a whole bunch of other things as well. So,  we build physical, creative spaces, we mobilize people, we do research, all sorts of things.  So, we really kind of identify cultural leaders or community leaders. The idea is not to replicate,  it's not to go in and do something, it's to enhance or assist people. So, for example,  in Uganda, we kind of go through different channels, but we put calls out for people,  we have a process of kind of identifying people. So, it would never be to replicate anything,  it's only to work with people on the ground. So, in Rwanda, we've done historically a  bit of work there, but I would approach someone like your NGO and say, hey, who would be good  to work with, and we have conversations and do a little bit of kind of finding out, and  then we worked with those organizations. And it might be that the training needs to be modified  or that there's elements of it that aren't relevant or contextualized. So, we do a lot  of work around that as well to make sure it really works in the different countries. But  it would be good to talk to you about your NGO.  Any other questions?  Hi. Hi. Oh. That's all I think is.  Sometimes techniques.  Yeah. Thank you for the presentation, for the wonderful job you're doing.  Thank you. It might be a little bit naive, but I was just curious how, like, building  all these networks and all these amazing opportunities, how you deal with languages,  how you connect people, how does this work?  So, we have translated the program into different languages. So, we work to train trainers in  different places, and we translate the resources into different languages as much as we can  afford to do, and depending on where we deliver the work. And where we're working in communities,  say, Venezuela, where we build case studies, so we have staff that speak Spanish and so  on. So, it's hard, and especially when we're working in, say, African countries where there  are many, many local languages in Zimbabwe, Shona, and Nabele, and so on. And I think  it's very much about trying to find a way through. I guess the people that we want to  reach the most are the people who are the most likely to just speak a local language.  And so, in that sense, it's about working with local community leaders who can then  help us translate the resources and so on. It's hard, but I think we're managing to kind  of get about that, and we work in lots and lots of places that speak lots of languages.  Generally there's always someone in the community who speaks English or a kind of European language  which is helpful. But yeah, it's still a challenge. Yeah.  So one last call for the last question. Come on over.  Hi. I'm Ken. I live and work in South Africa. My question is, how did you get the University  of Manchester to formally certify these people that might be located in rural villages in  very, very hard to connect areas? So my organisation is based partly at the  University of Manchester. And when I first took this to them, they said, this is crazy.  They were like, this isn't... because they were first of all, they said, okay, where's  the money going to come from and so on. And so I talked to them about it in terms of this  is kind of a social responsibility, and we talk about widening participation in the university.  So actually, this isn't going to be something that the university can monetise, but this  is a great thing to do. And the University of Manchester has these  beacons of kind of priorities, and one of them is social responsibility. So it fits  really well with kind of their vision for the world. And so we went through a process  of having this certified, and we also have it accredited. And it took a while, but we  made it happen. And I think it's that thing about this has... the university works with  lots of people who are obviously very privileged. And this is the end of that spectrum. And  it means the university is working with a wider range of people from across society.  So I got there in the end. Thanks. Thank you very much. If somebody has a private  question for Ruth, I think she will be here or outside. Thank you very much. A great applause  for Ruth Daniel.
re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_0_167.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_168_1007.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_1008_1967.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_1968_2279.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_2280_2363.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_2364_6563.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_6564_8711.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_8712_8855.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_8856_9887.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_9888_10259.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_10260_10367.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_10368_14879.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_14880_15311.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_15312_16043.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_16044_16223.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_16224_16307.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_16308_16667.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_16668_16727.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_16728_18779.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_18780_19067.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_19068_19151.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_19152_19223.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_19224_19883.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_19884_20051.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_20052_20111.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_20112_20567.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_20568_25343.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_25344_31643.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_31644_34571.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_34572_35099.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_35100_35243.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_35244_35435.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_35436_37055.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_37056_37775.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_37776_37955.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_37956_38507.png re_publica_2017_-_Ruth_Daniel__The_Creative_Entrepreneurial_Ecosystem__Democratising_learning_____-t_38508_39177.png