ABOUT ME

My name is Eden and I am a high schooler in Geneva, Switzerland. I initiated this project to have a direct impact for school children in remote areas of developing countries to improve their access to clean drinking water, initiate their digital literacy learning, and enhance their access to sport.
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Football is my passion and I have played since the age of 3. I currently play on the U19 team of my local football club and also for my school. I've also always loved technology. In 2018, for my school Passion Project, I created a website with notes and resources aimed to help students that were looking for extra help in the sciences.  I also helped tutor younger students in the Middle School. In 2019, ​I completed a research project on global digital literacy which underlined for me how important digital literacy is for students in the 21st century. I am now researching a disease that effects children which is linked to poor quality drinking water from a chemistry perspective. I began to see a lot of my interests were coming together and focused on helping younger students, technology and the environment, and wanting to expand on what I had already done in these projects, I decided to create a longer-lasting project.
 
I decided to collect used football shoes and used devices to give to schools without access to technology. Through my former primary school teacher, Martine Coppens, who started her own school in Sierra Leone and with whom I had been involved in fundraising events, we came up with a plan to equip one of her classrooms for technology-based learning. As well, my dad, who grew up and worked in Papua New Guinea, put me in touch with a foundation which has connected us with schools there which could use our help.  After starting to connect with the schools, I was shocked to learn that the children in these schools still suffer from issues related to unclean drinking water. There are cases every month and some children need to be hospitalised! I realised that computers are useless to children if they are not healthy so we had to expand our mission to include clean drinking water, but using computer learning as an important component of their water solutions.  I hope these first recipient schools will be the first of many that we will be able to help. 

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I'm joined in the project by friends from other high schools who are just excited to work together for helping these kids focusing on education, environment and sport.