That's what it offers, just huge scale. So you're talking about billions of people's lives being changed.
Julia, thanks so much for joining me today. You've got the Wellcome Trust where you're doing amazing things around scientific advancement, your work in education and women's empowerment. And still it seems like you have enough energy to do even more. So maybe you can just have, what's driving you at this stage of life?
I should probably say you didn't see me before I had a cup of coffee this morning. That's possibly a bit of the explanation for the energy, but, you know, it doesn't matter what you've done in the past, you've got to keep learning. The Wellcome Trust I get to learn from the scientists, the Global Institute for Women's Leadership, I get to learn from the young researchers. The women and girls in CAMFED are just a source of joy and energy and ideas, and that really nurtures me and then gives me a new sense of energy and resolve that while so much is changing, we've got to also be making sure that these new ways of working, new technologies are being applied in a way that is lifting us all up together rather than dividing us more.
Oh, that was a mic drop moment.
Thank you. You know, education was the original love. You know, the sort of North Star that took me into public policy, public advocacy, propelled me with enough energy to ride the lumps and bumps and to get into politics. As Prime Minister, I pursued those policies as well. But in my time post politics, I had to think through, well, if you still care about education, which I still did, what is it that you can do differently? And so that took me first led to chairing the Global Partnership for Education, which is still the major multilateral fund that invests in school education in developing countries. And it also took me to being patron of the Campaign for Female Education, which is a role I still hold. And that's about supporting girls' education in Africa.
And then the really powerful thing about the model is it keeps those girls together. And on average, the alumni give back enough money to the Campaign for Female Education to fund three more girls. So it's a sort of exponential model for change.
So it's exciting to be involved in. And they are really a force. But I know you're philanthropically interested in education too, aren't you?
Yeah. And actually quite similar. So, my journey on education, really to give back, started in the year 2000. I went back to the orphanage where my father was raised, and I built a computer lab.
And I was fortunate enough my dad was still with me that he could come. He came with me and everyone was like, oh, this is not the United States. You can't build a computer lab in two months. Look, the electricity goes off regularly. We don't have anyone to teach it. And I just remember my dad, one of my fondest memories of my dad was just in Arabic saying, don't discourage the girl. Let her show you what she can do. And what I found was, I went to go say thank you to my dad. And instead I walked away with a completely different career trajectory. I started a nonprofit with a former colleague and a friend. And it was really about how do you work with local nonprofits and under-resourced communities to help them develop the capacity to bring education technology in their communities?
You had some amazing stats about education and literacy.
Yeah, I mean, it's a tragedy that, you know, in our world today, there are, you know, hundreds of millions of children who don't get to go to school at all and hundreds of millions more who only go for a very short time, you know, two or three years. And then there's the problem of educational quality. So in many parts of the world, kids might be attending, but they're not learning. And I think it is head spinning that, you know, we have amazing opportunities. I mean, you'd be much more at the frontier in this than me. And I think this is where the challenge we have right now with AI and the speed in which it's moving, how are we making sure that they're also getting the skills?
We partnered with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to develop a program called Experience AI, which is aimed at 11 to 14 year olds to understand what AI is, how to use it responsibly. We tested it in underserved communities in the United Kingdom because our belief was if we can develop it with our local communities, then we can scale it. But we need to target it at the right audience first. But again, this isn't any one company or any one country. I think we all owe it to the fact that AI is going to develop at an extraordinary pace. How do we think about changing the educational policies and infrastructure, upskilling teachers and parents, and getting beyond the conversation of AI as a homework answer and instead being an assistant to help you explore your learning and the way that you like to learn?
