By TECHNOLOGY TIMES Reporter

Lagos. June 28, 2013: Dell says it has added Nigeria and three other countries to its Youth Learning programme designed to empower children across the globe with access to education and technology for imparting them.
The US technology company reckons that there are 72 million children worldwide that are not in school and lack access to the facilities, teachers and the technology they need for a better education.
Dell says it believes that access to education and technology is not a luxury, but a necessity.
“That’s why we work directly with communities and non-profit organizations around the world to close the learning gap and give young people the power to discover better possibilities”, according to the company.
In FY2013, Dell says it has expanded the programme to four new countries – Ireland, Nigeria, the Philippines and Singapore, to expand its reach to 15 countries and more than 2,600 community locations worldwide.
In FY13, Dell said it provided learning opportunities to nonprofit organizations in 15 countries, who work with more than five million people.
“We added partners in Ireland, Nigeria, the Philippines and Singapore. We directly reached 304,000 youths and trained more than 11,000 educators”, Dell says.
The company also built on the success seen from the Dell Social Innovation Challenge by launching the Dell Education Challenge, a new competition focused on finding solutions to today’s biggest challenges in K-12 education, the company announced in its FY13 Corporate Responsibility Summary Report.
Dell team members volunteered more than 707,000 hours in their communities, surpassing its goal of 500,000 hours and making a three-fold increase in volunteerism since 2010. More than half of Dell’s global workforce, 56 per cent, participated in community service activities with more than 15,000 charities in 60 countries, the company said.