 Okay, thank you very much. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us. We have a few more people coming in. All right, thank you. Good evening to everybody here. And good evening to everybody online watching us today. Thank you for joining us for this press conference, which we've titled Girls in Space. And if you're looking for a practical story about Africa and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we have one for you. I'm very pleased to introduce, here we have with us today, we have Judy Sandrock, who's co-founder and CEO of Mido Space Economic Development. Also with us is Carla DeClerc, who's a program manager at Mido Space. Thank you very much for joining us. Okay, the way we will run today is we will invite them to share with us some updates. And then we will be able to go to the audience to have an interaction with a few questions. I may have one or two questions. I'd like to invite you to please be interactive with your questions as well. Let's help them tease out the story. Okay, so Judy, the floor is yours. I think I'm as curious as everybody else. You mean thank you? Yes, thank you very much. Mido Space. Mido is an acronym for the Meta Economic Development Organization, and what we do is we run economic development programs. Our tagline and our primary goal is building the economy one job at a time. Two years ago, with everybody starting to talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we realized that what we had to do as a continent is really get ready so that we can take full advantage of that industrial revolution. So we have started our Women in STEM program, STEM being an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. And in order to make this really inspirational, what we did is we bought the first private satellite and a launch, and that launch is going to happen at the end of this year. What we've also done is with our partners around the world is we've been able to invest in a number of further launches subsequent to the one at the end of this year, and we'll have a satellite going into orbit every year between now and 2020. That's amazing. Yes, and the thing is, it's very nice to buy a satellite and a launch, but what are you going to do with it? What we're really going to do is we are having young women in high school designing the experiments that are going to fly on those satellites. We've got to the point now where we've already got two experiments that have been designed and they're being built. And what we did is in the last school holiday, which was during April, we had the young women come in to our Amido Center in Cape Town, and what they did is that they workshopped with space engineers, space engineering engineers on what can we make possible, how do we put it together, and our colleague Bjarke has a team of five engineers who are currently building the first payload for that satellite. That's amazing. Now, if I can just, maybe just to make sure I fully understand. Your first satellite is going to be launched this year? Yes. And this is the first kind of privately-owned satellite being launched in Africa? Absolutely. All the other satellites have gone up from universities, and what we've done is we've decided to turn everything on its head, and it's all about what does the next generation want to do with technology? The thing is, somebody of my age isn't going to be very good with coming up with innovative concepts. When I studied engineering, we didn't have internet, and I know that for you, it's like, how can you live without internet? Absolutely. You know, I actually went through a whole engineering degree without internet. Absolutely. So I'm never going to come up with the right ideas. Okay, but again, just to nail the story here, so we do have a story, first satellite going up 2016. This year it's real. Now, I heard a second story. Did you say every year till 2020? So that's five by 2020? Yes. All right. That's, I think, quite a powerful story as well. Now, before we go to come out to you, Clara, I have another question. How do you go from educating girls in STEM to buying a satellite? I don't see an immediate connection. Is there a story there as well? Yes, there is a story. What it is, is that we realized with the fourth industrial revolution on its way, was that we had to have a Young Women in STEM program. It's something that is globally recognized as a challenge of introducing young women to STEM careers. And so what we did is we went out and we had a look at globally what is best practice. And we found a program in Eastern Kentucky in the USA. It's a very, very impoverished region of the USA. And they run this space tech program. And it's been incredibly successful. They've been running it now for six years. And over the first five years, they were able to track how they had young women on the space tech program. They then were encouraged to apply at university. Well, first of all, you know, get good school marks, so that they could apply for university. And last year they had their first graduates in engineering coming out of their local university who had five years before that been engaged on one of these workshops. So we saw that this could work. There were results. It's a model that works, so we've brought it to Africa and we've customized it for our environment. Fantastic. I think this is a great opportunity to bring Carla in. Alright, so Carla, does it work? And how does it work? So we've taken this model and adapted it at home. Can you tell us, really, how does it work and does it work? I guess it's always quite difficult to measure what does it mean when it works. Do we want a whole generation of engineers and that's it? No, we want to get girls interested and excited and passionate about STEM or whatever it may be that they want to do. It's about inspiring them to work hard at school so that they can go to university, so they can study something and add to their economy. So if they're like maths, it doesn't mean they have to go study mathematics and become a mathematician. They can start designing websites. They can work in construction. They can do anything and that's really what we want to prove to them that you can really do anything. With the last batch of girls that came and started designing the satellite one half of them now want to become satellite engineers. The other half want to become astronauts. And you know, why not? We want to empower these girls to take responsibility for their lives, to take power, to take pride in their lives. So I'd say, yeah, that works. And how many batches have you had and when did you start the program? So we started exactly a year ago. Last year on June 16 we had a big launch event where we started giving workshops in designing small robots using basic electronics. So over that past year we worked with 120 young women in Cape Town, around in South Africa. And with those 120 young women we have chosen 20 that we have gone further with. In the end they have to have passion. They have to be interested in what we want to teach them. So that is the big motivator how we go further with young women. So now on youth day, 16 of June we are actually going to have a big hackathon, a robotics building day with over 200 young women. So we are growing and we are building and we are looking to eventually reach 2,000 girls within a year. Okay, I have to be really careful with them. They seem to have lots of stories that they package. This is another story. So this is 6th of June, hackathon... 16th of June, thank you. On South African youth day. Fantastic, 16th of June there is a hackathon, a youth hackathon with over 200 women, girls. Where they are going to be programming, coding and designing robots. Okay, you heard it here first and you can break that story first. So that is in about 5 weeks. Okay, at this point I think I would love to open it up because I see quite an engaged audience. So if you have a question that will help you make this story more relevant to your audience please put your hand up. Otherwise I will keep asking questions. Mike that is Roman, if you have a question you want to ask right now. Thank you. Thank you. I am the converted. But for the benefit of everybody else I am Laude Araba from the Viziela Foundation which is based in Nigeria which shares a similar mission with the MEDA organization. And I am just curious to know what is the criteria that you utilize in selecting the girls that you work with. I know you talked about you started out with 120 and then you I guess whittled it down to 20 but in general when you are looking at the week long space boot camps what types of girls are you targeting? Okay, so let me just explain how exactly the program works. The program is divided into phases. We have phase one which is space prep where we go out to the schools and we teach them how to build a small very basic robot. It's a one day workshop that we do on Saturdays at the schools, no cost to the girls whatsoever and it's fun, it's exciting, it's interesting. And then we tell them please go to our website and apply get your name onto our server. So then eventually we accumulate 120 young girls that we have who have applied to go further or some who don't have applied who said you know this is just not for me, I'm done. And then we interview each of these girls and when we interview them they're extremely afraid, they worry we're going to give them a maths equation to solve or do some science for us. No, we just want to see interest and passion, we want to see whether they do want to go further or whether they are able to work in a team. So that is all that we require from them. So that means they'll go through to the next phase which is space trick. This is a week long boot camp where we take all the chosen girls away away from their homes, away from everything into the middle of nowhere and we work to design a very basic satellite, I actually have one here. This is called a cricket satellite. It's slightly more complex than anything else but this cricket satellite measures the temperature of the atmosphere up to eight kilometres. So each of these girls, they learn how to build this how to put it together, how it works and then they send it up with a weather balloon and they need to track it with the radio they need to read the data they need to work out what is the temperature by just getting a ton of numbers and then at the end of the week they start to do a big presentation explaining what they learned, how does it work what is the satellite and then generally these girls after they've done space trick they're so excited and so interested to go further we don't have to ask them we'll just give them a call and say listen we're having a satellite building workshop in the coming school holiday we'll be interested and they change the holiday plans so that they can come to us and build satellites Fantastic, thank you so much if you have any questions please put your hand up please It's Oliver Cowden from the forum I may have missed his apologies but I'd love to know whether you can scale this up and take it to other parts of Africa Thank you very much for that question we certainly are scaling it up to take it to the entire continent of Africa in Mido we never attempt anything that we unless we know we can scale it first so the whole way we've designed the program is for scalability and what we've come to realise in the first year of running the program is that we've got three vital ingredients the first is that we need to have free access to internet as soon as we start running the workshops we find that a lot of the young women start taking responsibility for their own education and for their own learning so in other words not having a great maths or science teacher isn't a barrier all the information that they need is out there on the internet they just need to be able to access it for nothing so free access to internet is the first thing the second thing is we need to have a local university with a technical faculty because the model is that we utilise undergraduate students to run the space preps on the weekends they get paid for it, it's great student work and also we use the post grad students to help us with the bootcamps as well as to start building the payloads so we need to have that university that technical university and the third thing is we need to have a corporate sponsor who wants to have impact within that region so what we've got is we haven't got any physical constraints to those three aspects and we've got incredible relationships with a number of universities and we've been in great conversations with a number of universities so that we can actually roll out across the continent when the satellite's in orbit it's in a polar orbit so what's going to happen is that it's going to be crossing over the African continent every 90 minutes so it is a program that we have to run across the continent it's not only just for one country this is something that we want to do as Africans for Africa Fantastic, thank you very much I believe we had a question in the front can you get a microphone Thank you My name is Ethan Tashavia I work with the New Times Rwanda I wanted to know if the discussions involve some of the universities here in Rwanda Rwanda is one of the countries that are so much focused on promoting technology especially with girls and my second question goes to Tia as well maybe the two of you what do you see as the future of girls in ICT or in IT Thank you Thank you Should I take the first question and then you go into the future of the girls in terms of Rwanda we have very very deep in conversation with your ministry for youth in ICT in terms of we've already had an engagement with the university here in Kigali because it would be absolutely perfect to be able to utilize the university the ministry for youth in ICT is clearly very very on board we've got two of the factors in place and now what we're doing is here at the forum is we're going to have a call to action to say please we need a sponsor who can sponsor the program in Rwanda because we're ready to go Okay so for number two then the future of girls in ICT well we want to build a strong competitive African economy if you look at the stats less than 14% of all STEM careers are currently held by women worldwide and it's also predicted that by 2020 80% of all careers will be STEM related so there's quite a big gap currently women don't feature in the STEM fields they don't feature in the development fields of developing technology apps or medicine for that so in short we want to see girls starting to participate in the economy want to push them to go further to know that the sky is the limit so yeah the future of girls in ICT is to take part in it Fantastic thank you very much if we have a question if we have a question in the back thank you My name is Victor Kotebe I'm a student in African leadership magazine in Nigeria I'm just curious about privately owned satellites when you say you buy you intend to buy one each year how much does each cost Great should I take a question yes Certainly what it is is that the small format satellite industry globally has really really expanded quite rapidly before yes so what it is that in order to buy small format satellite in a launch one's looking at anywhere between 100,000 US dollars and 250,000 US dollars so that's for the satellite and the launch now when we talk about a small format satellite oh sorry Carla she's just lost her payload this is the size of the satellite it's a cube set and it's exactly a liter it's 10 centimeters cubed so the days of sending up something the size of a bus are gone so this is the format that we're looking at and there are hundreds of satellites that are being launched every year around the world to go and actually perform experiments so that's kind of like what you're looking at in terms of numbers there's also something else that I'd like to mention from an economic development perspective and an entrepreneurial opportunity is if we have a look this is the latest format of a satellite this is called a pocket cube so now this is a lot smaller than a cube set so here we are looking at 5 centimeters cubed and this is what the format's going to so with the electronics getting smaller and smaller the payloads are getting a lot lighter and it's going to cost a lot less to launch this is actually made from electronics components that have been developed in South Africa and we're manufacturing in South Africa so we are not importing these components it's not as if we're making a middleman rich an importer rich but what we've got is we've got the components and they clip together these are the components that the young women work with when they come on the camps and we're able to mass produce these components these various components their power modules their coding modules all of that kind of thing but also they're robust enough to be able to actually go up into space so they can handle the launch and rolling out in Rwanda for example for every space prep that's going to be run on a Saturday there's an opportunity for an undergraduate student here to be able to actually utilize the electronics and it becomes a small micro franchise in itself so there is a whole enterprising component that's attached to this so it's very much a sector initiative as opposed to being a purely academic venture fantastic thank you do we have any other comments or questions thank you we have one more there we have more questions alright let's go please my name is Ben Gubane I'm chairman of Escom the South African power utility we're quite excited by this we have young scientists expo program which we support and fund and brings in a lot of young people from schools we also have an Escom women's advancement program through which we aim to have a 50-50 share in the senior and top management of Escom and then of course going down further the ladder as we go on so this is quite exciting I used to be minister of science and technology for South Africa Peter there, my friend we get excited about pushing young people into science because that is the future semiconductor technology is going to shape all our lives from virtual reality to clean energy etc and space is the most thing you can think of so when women get into that stream of thinking digitally that holds a great hope for Africa so thank you thank you very much we have another question in the back and that's a great story by the way Escom chairman, former minister excited by the initiative so that's another story you're getting more than you bargained for my name is Zinzi I'm from backless Africa so I've got two questions for you the first one is the girls who are out there in the deep rural areas how are you reaching out to them because they do have potential some of them they spend a lot of time going to the wells to fetch water how do we get them out of that space and then the second one is this SKA project what's your involvement in that space and is there any plan to create a pipeline of youth and especially girls who are actually going to be trained so that they will be able to take the SKA project forward I'll take number one how do we reach the girls in the rural areas well Mido has two mobile learning centers these are two big trucks that are kitted out with everything internet, workstations, power it is a completely independent truck on its own it doesn't need anything whatsoever so this is how we run most of the space programs we go to schools that don't have infrastructure of wifi power cables everywhere so this mobile truck, it's a mobile learning center goes to the school we actually bring all the girls inside to work inside the truck build all the robots in there learn in there experience in there use the wifi in there so we've always had a saying of everyone needs to learn no matter what their location just because you happen to live in a city where there's so many outreach programs at NGOs it doesn't mean that the guy way far in the eastern cave doesn't have that right as well so Mido goes as far as we possibly can yes thank you let me come in on that one as well Cindy thank you very much a lot of my background as an engineer was working with mining communities in the mining industry as well as pulp and paper currently 50% of South Africa's population is rural if we take a country like Kenya we're looking at 85% of the population is rural so our model has to be where we can prioritize rural communities so we have a predominantly rural population on our continent that is where we have to go as Carla mentions that is why our model includes where we actually go into communities using our trucks that are ketted out as mobile laboratories you mentioned SKA the square kilometer array project in the northern Cape certainly we have one drive and the team is very, very, very keen they have got an outreach program they have got a commitment that they've made in terms of outreach but also at the same time they're on very tight project deadlines so the conversations we're having with them at the moment is about pooling our resources so that we can actually we can do that outreach program for them so that we can get people in astronomy space and especially with it being a radio telescope and we're using radio technology to communicate with the satellites that that's absolutely key so there's a very nice alignment we have a strong relationship with sensor which is the South African National Space Agency they've endorsed our program and we're also doing outreach with them and with their team so we've got very nice linkages over there only on Monday it was this last few days on Monday I was having a conversation with a company by the name of Biotherm Energy and they've got massive solar farms in the northern Cape of South Africa very, very remote tiny communities they're small number of children in school one of the communities has only got seven youngsters studying maths and science in their final years of schooling so there is a huge challenge not only in terms of engaging young people but the thing is that what often happens is that companies find it very difficult nowadays to get engineers and technologists to go into these areas and work there on solar farms on mines on projects like SKA nowadays all professionals have got professional spouses so one has to have jobs for two people and careers for two people when one's looking at rural areas so getting a city slicker to move out to a rural area is virtually impossible what we need to do is we need to encourage the youngsters where they live to pursue these careers go to university and now what they can do is now they can build the economy at home they can earn those top salaries at home and in that way generate that local economy too often what we see is that there will be a resource whether it's the sun or whether it's gold or whether it's iron ore and the people in that community are not benefiting directly from that resource it's the people in the big cities and the employers and who are the professionals moving to that area so you're absolutely right if we're going to be looking at the fourth industrial revolution and we're going to have a proper look at our continent we have to take these factors into consideration when we run a program like this alright thank you so much I see more hands we're almost out of time if it's okay I'll take one more and then you'll have a chance to all interact let's take one more right here thank you thanks very much when you talk about young people and the people you encounter and you just mentioned the SKA project we've heard a lot of the forum about Africa needing to catch up with the rest of the world I mean do you think this is catching up or do you think the human resources that you've seen mean that Africa could become leading edge in space and technology great question thank you and I'd like to invite both of you so one of you can answer the question but like both of you two probably close as well so maybe you can answer the question if you can make some final comments or remarks so that we can let you all go I know you're very busy so to answer your question firstly we do have a bit of catching up to do but that doesn't mean we're lagging too far behind that in a few years by 2020 even we can't have caught up already Africa has so much potential we have so many individuals so many passionate individuals so excited to work in Africa and make it the continent it should be we do have a bit of work yes but why the hell can't we catch up we at Mido believe there's no problem there's a solution so it's not that Africa is in a dark place no we are working towards going forward we are going to space we're having the first private satellite going up we have I know of at least six other satellites being developed currently in South Africa so there is so much going around but let's start at the basics let's start at the youth get them to build their economy for us fantastic thank you so much Julie I think Peter what we saw with the uptake of GSM on the African continent you know the thing is that the Americans had invested decades and billions of dollars in landlines and the technology changed and suddenly we utilized GSM right across our continent within a year and exactly the same thing is happening with the space industry the Americans have invested billions and billions of dollars over many decades since the 1950s in building their space programs and now we've got a format that looks like this you know and the thing is that what we're going to find is that on our continent we're going to leapfrog and we're going to be able to position ourselves absolutely perfect for this format so I don't think we need to worry about being linear and thinking we're currently lagging behind so therefore we're always going to be behind what we're going to do is we're going to leapfrog so what we need to do is we now need to start focusing on how can we start launching satellites from the African continent you know there's one thing that they say rocket science is not really rocket science it's actually pretty easy you know it's the technology is there and it's not even priority technology what we need to do is we need to make sure that we can launch from our continent and we can take advantage of this massive market that's developing out there in the right place at the right time we're not lagging behind that's fantastic thank you so much and true to form that is yet another story right at the end of the press conference so disruption in the space industry opens up an opportunity for Africa to leapfrog that's a great story you can write it you've got the content I want to say thank you so much thank you all for your engagement we have Africa's first private satellite to be launched this year we have five by 2020 we have a model that produces these outcomes in a very scalable way it's interactive it's fun and it actually stimulates and supports private sector development as well so it's not all pie in the sky it's really concrete and we know the SCOM chairman is excited about this as well thank you so much for your time they'll be around for more questions thank you