Student launches Mali project

If personal inspiration is a necessary element for attaining success, Wharton junior Neysan Rassekh is well on his way. Rassekh, the only undergraduate enrolled in Wharton's Transportation Department, has initiated a project designed to bring the Internet to school children in West Africa, focusing on Mali, where he grew up. Rassekh is now implementing the idea, which began as an independent study project under Sociology Professor Elijah Anderson. Anderson said his student was "motivated to address some of the world's problems." "Business leaders of the future need to look beyond the profit and loss figures and toward the larger society," Rassekh explained. He noted that "there is an enormous lag time" between when new textbooks begin to be used in European countries and their subsequent arrival in West African schools. The information in the books can be up to 10 years old, Rassekh added. His goal is to cut down that time to help eliminate discrepancies between the educations of European and West African children. Rassekh's project will take place in three stages. His first goal was to gain access to "basic educational research material on the Internet." The scholastic level of this information, supplied by the National Air and Space Administration, corresponds to the elementary and junior high school levels of American education. "Because NASA is a government institution, as long as I'm not doing this for profit, I can get some of their software and bring it [via the Internet] to these West African schools" Rassekh explained. The next step in his plan was to acquire used computers from corporations and universities at little or no cost. He is presently in the process of obtaining this used equipment to transport to Mali. The last stage will be to "get some type of wireless technology installed so that these computers can be hooked up via satellite because there are no phone lines in many of these schools," Rassekh said. "I feel that much of Africa missed the Industrial Revolution, let us not let it miss the communication, technology and information revolution," Rassekh said. Currently, Rassekh is testing the efficacy of his ideas. "If it works," he elaborated, "I can implement it on a larger scale." Over winter break, Rassekh transported children to a test computer site where they researched topics of their choice using the Internet. And although student reaction was very positive, Rassekh admitted that he still has much to do. "To really implement it across the board, it will probably require some government approval, but I've begun on this pilot level," Rassekh noted. He recently met with four groups of people -- U.S. State Department officials, African ambassadors to the U.S., U.S. Commerce Department officials and the senior executives of companies with African investments -- to further his project. Although Rassekh was born in the United States, he has lived in African countries such as Senegal, Gambia and Mali, where his family continues to reside, since he was 4 years old. Rassekh said that he gained motivation for the project from his belief that "the situation in the world is extremely sensitive and I believe we will be facing major problems in the next couple of years, before the turn of the century." Although he did not specify what these "major problems" were, he emphasized the importance of helping mankind on an individual level. "I believe personally in giving something lasting back to the community," he added.