The Jameel Poverty Action Lab is only one of many projects
at MIT focused on fighting the ravages of poverty. Amy Smith, for instance,
works with MIT students to engineer low-tech ways to meet the day-to-day
challenges of people in the developing world, from a low-cost grain mill that
grinds flour 10 times faster than traditional tools do to an incubator for lab
samples that requires no electricity, allowing doctors to diagnose tuberculosis
in remote areas. In April, our students, through their own Global Poverty
Initiative, hosted a conference that brought to campus more than 1,000 young
people dedicated to tackling poverty.
Yet perhaps the most powerful tools to offer people in the
developing world are knowledge and analytical skills they can use themselves.
Today, MIT's OpenCourseWare makes materials for virtually all of the
Institute's 1,800 courses available online, to anyone on earth, free (see
ocw.mit.edu). Many courses have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and
Portuguese, with Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish versions on the way.
Since MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2001, more than 40
million people around the world have used the site. We regularly receive
e-mails from teachers, students, and self-learners, explaining how MIT
OpenCourseWare has improved their teaching or changed their lives. One woman
from Latin America wrote a note of thanks,
because OpenCourseWare opens "a window of knowledge for so many who are limited
by economic or other reasons," as she put it; "It's truly a way to spread
freedom to humankind." We hope she's right.
A version of this column by President Susan Hockfield ran in
the Boston Globe on April 14, 2008.
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