Social Entrepreneurship in China | Clotilde Pallier | TEDxShanghaiAmericanSchool
uh good evening ladies and gentlemen so I'm here with you tonight to share a very interesting ID that was born in Shanghai few years ago in 2012 but first of all let me explain to you the context in which this ID was born so let's start by a simple question with your obsolet computer your TV after you discard well there is a high risk that sorry a high risk that uh this is collected by illegal vendors you can even sell it to them and those vendors will send your electronic waste to some workshops mostly based in the south of China uh those Workshop the people who are working are just villagers they have uh no uh skill in he dismantling and of course they have no idea that dismantling Hew can be harmful to their health because in he there are a lot of toxic substances there are heavy metals lead Plum cadmium pcbs Etc so and the worst part is that after they dismantle those electronic devices then uh they will either burn land field or throw in the river the wanted part of those devices and this of course creates a very high environmental pollution in the area around those Workshop uh pollution of the water of course but also pollution of the land where the food is growing uh maybe you heard about the rice contamination contaminated with cadmium a few years ago well it's estimated that around 72% of the US are handled in that way in China today but it's actually not the worst in Us by example it's 95% of the us that are not handled in a proper way in Australia it's even 99% that is not handled in a proper way in those country heest are collected and then shipped to other countries poorer countries such as Nigeria in Africa or India or China to be dismantle without any tracking about how it is dismantled actually but what well let's go back to China so according to United Nation University in 2014 there were 6 million ton us produce and with those within those 6 million ton us there were about five million computers for most of them those computer are still usable after a little fixing little repair and then at the meantime there are 50 million students that have no computer in their schools so so those children are mostly in the rural area or are in the migrant schools that are not supported by the government so well you can see here there is obviously something to do to match the offer and the demand and this was the idea of the green it classroom the idea is very simple recycle the old computer to turn them into education tools for underprivileged children so how does it work exactly so for computers and individual instead of just throwing away your computer then you can have them refurbished and land to a school that really needs it for three years why three years because it's the average lifetime of uh refurbished computers then after those three years of course uh we will make sure that those computers are collected again and then dismantled in the proper factory factory that uh he uh accredited by the government so this nice program could just have been a charity program but it's not it's actually a social Enterprise um it's called net spring social Enterprise why is it the social Enterprise because the founders didn't want to rely on donations money donations and didn't want to rely on volunteers they wanted uh this program to run on the long term they wanted it to be sustainable so this is a real Enterprise with a real business plan and this is actually a service service company it offers service to other companies uh and it creates value for them so which kind of value does it create well first of all it creates uh value in term of environmental image for the companies because their computer are going to be used longer and they are going to be dismantled in a proper way at the end of the program it's also a good um value in term of social image for the company because it does good for the community around it also creates a value social value internally for the company because the volunteers that will participate to this kind of program will be prder about their company and will be more willing to stay in those company we be more loyal to the company and the last part and I think is the most important import actually is the educational value that we create with this program so it's a little bit more long-term Vision but it's estimated that by 2020 there will be a shortage of about 40 million highly qualified workers in the world and by giving the chance uh to more kid to have access to computer to technology and uh making them aware about what's happening in the world well hopefully we will be able to fill in the gap of those 14 million workers missing thank you