Development charity with Gates Cambridge board members wins Google’s Global Impact Award.
An international development organisation whose trustees include a Gates Cambridge Alumna and the former Provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust has won a major award from Google.
Google announced on Monday that Integrity Action had won its £500,000 Global Impact Award, voted for by the public. It was among 10 finalists in Google’s Global Impact Challenge, which supports British non-profits using technology to tackle the world’s toughest problems. The judging panel for the Challenge included Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Richard Branson.
Integrity Action works in several countries to involve communities in development projects and to ensure development money does not get lost along the way. It says the Award will allow it to develop an online data collection and reporting platform that enables citizens to hold government and development agencies accountable. Over the next 18 months it will train over 2,000 community monitors in seven war-torn countries and help citizens fix 50% of problems in public services and infrastructure projects.
Among Integrity Action’s distinguished board of trustees are Dr Gordon Johnson (Provost of Gates Cambridge between 2000 and 2010) and Alumna Dr Nilima Gulrajani [2001], who is currently Senior Researcher and Director of the Global Aid Governance Project at the Global Economic Governance Programme at the University of Oxford.
Gordon Johnson says: “Integrity Action works by encouraging grassroots participation rather than by imposing solutions from above. The Trust devotes its own resources to advocacy and education and by forming partnerships with other government and non-governmental agencies in helping to transform the lives of many people“.
Nilima adds: “Winning will enable us to impact positively on behalf of so many people.”
Details about Integrity Action and the Google Global Impact Challenge are available here.
