A credit to the nation
Experian joins forces with charity website to raise £220k for school laptops (as bank deposits £45k)
MAIL Force has received another stunning boost of more than £200,000 as the nationwide initiative to deliver laptops to schoolchildren hits top gear.
Experian, the consumer credit reporting company, and charity donation website The Big Give have raised the money together.
It lifts the running total of donations in cash and computer pledges from generous Daily Mail readers, philanthropists and corporations to an astonishing £12.1million.
Experian matched every £1 donated – up to a generous £100,100 – to the Computers for Kids campaign on The Big Give. The threshold was hit on the final day of the scheme this week thanks to almost 1,300 individual donors. It means the total raised on the platform has reached £221,999, including more than £21,000 in unmatched donations and gift aid.
The campaign to help disadvantaged children get online has also benefited from a cash boost of £45,700 from global investment bank Jefferies as part of its Doing Good effort.
Mail Force is one of 129 charities focused on ‘advancing diversity and inclusion’ to be chosen by the bank, which gave more than $8million, about £6million.
Students are facing the mammoth task of catching up on months of lost learning, a challenge made all the more difficult by the ‘digital divide’ – the huge gap between families who have enough devices and sufficient internet access and those who don’t. Thanks to the Daily Mail’s Computers for Kids campaign, thousands more children will have a laptop or tablet to access schoolwork. The first mass batch of 5,000 Mail Force laptops went to schools this month.
Among those to benefit is Ramonjit Parmar, 11, who has had little access to the family computer because her A-level student sister has priority. The pupil at Langley Academy, in Slough, Berkshire, said: ‘I cannot wait to start using my new laptop.’
In Scotland, plans are already well under way to distribute 2,000 devices. Computers have been handed to pupils at schools across the country, including in Aberdeenshire and Lanarkshire.