Amherst Alums Addressing African Growth
Ron Hoge ’67 and Dianne Hoge will moderate. Boris Bulayev ’07 and Bill Ryerson ’67 will describe their organizations and the work those organizations are doing to encourage and support educational and economic growth in Africa. Africa is projected to be home to 40 percent of the world’s population by 2100, with growth from 1.2 billion to nearly 4 billion people. This session will explore how two nonprofit organizations founded by Amherst alums—Educate! and Population Media Center—are successfully addressing key issues surrounding this projection. Educate! works to transform secondary education in East Africa by giving students the skills to start businesses, get jobs and improve their livelihoods. They have seen a doubling of student income through their work; will impact 26,000 students intensively this year across 20 percent of Uganda’s high schools and 15 percent of Rwanda’s; have had core model components adopted nationally in both countries; were recently the subject of an Al Jazeera documentary; and have been highlighted by Bill Gates, Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and The Brookings Institution as a successful global scaling education initiative. Population Media Center takes a different tack by directly addressing the African population growth challenge itself. PMC creates long-running prime-time serialized dramas on radio and TV in which key characters evolve into positive role models for such goals as ending child marriage, daughter education, child spacing and use of effective methods of family planning. Their programs have been shown to be effective at attracting huge audiences and in changing national norms on the issues addressed. Presented by the Classes of 1967 and 2007.