Graduate Entrepreneurship Training Through Information Technologies - HP GET-IT Website

There are some 10-16 million disabled people in Russia today. More than one million of them are children. To a large extent, the existing “special education” system for children with disabilities in countries of the former Soviet Union cannot keep pace with social and technological changes. Yet ICT can give disabled children a chance to better adapt to the demands of the modern labour market and work as competent professionals rather than beneficiaries of social aid.

The HP-ORT GET-IT Training Center’s goal has been to help children with special needs in the countries of the former Soviet Union so that they can break through the digital divide and became full members of the modern technological society. Thanks to the GET-IT trainings, 130 disabled children from the No.2 Tula Vocational Training Boarding School were trained on GET-IT in the first year of the program. "It is obvious that people with hearing disabilities experience difficulties when working within large groups of people (as it is generally implied that everyone is able to hear and speak). Nevertheless these people can work at home or in small firms, or even start their own small businesses and live a decent life,”  says Prof. Nikolay Malofeev, Director of Institute of Corrective Pedagogy.

As a the world's largest technology company and as a leader in the domain of philanthropy among global corporations, HP is uniquely positioned to help local organisations across the former Soviet Union reach their goal of breaking the digital divide and helping thousands of disabled children become full members of the modern technological society.

“All the students from the Tula Boarding School would like to express their deep thanks to those people who helped open the HP-ORT GET-IT Center at our Boarding School. As many of us have PCs at home, we had some initial computer skills. But now we’ve got skills and knowledge that were simply unknown to us before. To be honest, many of us used computers only for entertainment and as an expensive toy."

"We now know about programs such as Microsoft Office, PhotoShop, and Corel DRAW that will be useful to us in our future jobs. We have become more skilled in programs that are used for video and audio processing and know about anti-virus programs and the basics of how they work.”

GET-IT Center Students, Tula (Russia)