Oracle Joins the White House in Global Campaign to Empower Girls and Women

The Oracle Education Foundation is a nonprofit organization funded by Oracle Corporation. Its mission is to "inspire students globally to think, connect, create and share -- using technology to help them dissolve boundaries, fulfill their potential, and create a better society."

Oracle teamed up with the White House back in April to donate money to support the Obama administration's Computer Science for All initiative. The goal is to empower and engage student through various computer science programs in over 1,100 US institutions. They hope the money and attention will draw young people around the world into learning about science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. The company committed $200 million to the cause.

On the heels of Oracle’s $200 million commitment to support Computer Science (CS) Education for All,the White House announced Oracle’s additional $3 million investment to immerse girls worldwide in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The company’s commitment of direct and in-kind funding supports “Let Girls Learn,” a U.S. government initiative aimed at helping adolescent girls around the world go to school and stay in school.

"We want more girls focused on building upon science and math fundamentals and we want more women choosing the technical disciplines because they are both prepared to do so and because they believe it will advance their career opportunities," Oracle's (female) CEO, Safra Catz, said in a statement.

Oracle will offer more than 65 educational events and reach over 55,000 young girls globally through a powerful nexus of its corporate social responsibility programs spanning Oracle Academy, Oracle Education Foundation, Oracle Giving and Volunteers, (OWL), and Oracle Diversity and Inclusion. Events will include summer computing camps, codefests, workshops and conferences designed to encourage and inspire adolescent girls to become original thinkers, creative designers and enterprising trailblazers.

The money will help to fund programs to send 55,000 young girls around the world to various summer computing camps, codefests, workshops and conferences. Additionally, Oracle plans to expand its CS efforts in Egypt with an additional investment of nearly $1 million in educational resources and services over the next four years. The commitment is part of a new collaboration between the Ministry of Education in Egypt, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Oracle Academy, Oracle’s philanthropic educational program that impacts more than 2.6 million students in 106 countries. The partnership will support computing education in nine newly-created STEM schools throughout the country, including one boarding school exclusively for girls which will accept up the top 10 percent of girls across the governorates, reaching 150 girls each year and providing three years of paid education for each girl.

With the donation, Oracle joins several other technology companies which are participating in the White House’s computer science program. Both Google (GOOG, +0.89%) and Salesforce (CRM, +0.17%) (as well as the Cartoon Network) said they would donate in aggregate over $60 million to the program when it was first announced.

As part of the company’s global campaign to support girls and women in technology, Oracle will drive several notable projects:

• Oracle Academy will team with Arizona State University and others under the USAID Build-IT project to help women in Vietnam develop into IT leaders.
• Oracle Education Foundation and Oracle Volunteers will team to teach girls coding, electrical engineering and project management through girls-only workshops for Design Tech High School (d.tech), an innovative, free California public high school. Oracle is building d.tech’s new facility at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif., making d.tech the world’s first public high school on a technology campus.
• Oracle Giving and Oracle Academy will award grants and sponsorships globally to nonprofit organizations striving to increase girls’ access to educational opportunities and encourage them to pursue degrees in computer science and STEM fields.
• Oracle Giving will continue its support for MentorNet, which engages STEM professionals in the virtual mentoring of undergraduates, 66% of whom are women.

Oracle Academy, a computer science educational program, and Burning Glass Technology, an analytics company, recently did research and found that programming jobs grow 50 percent faster than the market average. As technology is increasingly present in people's personal and professional lives, there is a need for computer science learning.

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