Meeting with Nicolas Negroponte and Herman Van Rompuy

Recently, Mr. Nicolas Negroponte & Mr. Jonas De Cooman were invited by Mr. Van Rompuy to have a chat on how access to information could create a change from within in less-developed countries.

Mr. Negroponte is professor emeritus at MIT, and is the founder of the One-Laptop-Per-Child program. He has explained to Mr; Van Rompuy the relevance of distributing laptops to youngsters and giving them access to the world wide web. In total, 1,8 mio laptops have been distributed, and Uruguay was mentioned as the best practice. In Uruguay, thanks to a partnership with the local government, all of the 360.000 children & 18.000 teacher, have received a XO laptop.

Mr De Cooman, a social entrepreneur & co-founder of YouBridge, explained that YouBridge had a similar goal of giving students access to information by connecting them to the internet. However, YouBridge went one step further, in that sense that it aims to partner up students from the less-developed countries with donors from Europe. Thus YouBridge is not only focussing on the hardware side of the story, but also on the relationship side of the story. Connecting people from whole over the world with each other. In that sense, YouBridge is the first real social network.

Mr. Van Rompuy was very interested in both stories, and mentioned that social entrepreneurs are becoming more & more important in both Europe & US. He encouraged both Mr. Negroponte & Mr. De Cooman to keep up the good work, and to keep on changing the life of youngsters across the world. This by giving them access to information and giving them the chances to develop themselves, in order to realize their dreams.