Generating digital harmony
During the Covid-19 lockdown early this year, New Zealand’s digital divide was thrust into the spotlight, and now generations have come together to close the gap between the digital haves and have nots.
Spend my Super, an organisation where superannuitants can donate their superannuation to charity, has paired with a group of students from Porirua’s Aotea College who founded Remojo Tech, a company refurbishing old laptops to give to kids in need.
Remojo Tech’s chief executive, 18-year-old Hadi Daoud, taught himself how to refurbish old technology. He founded the company in 2017 when he started training other students to fix broken laptops, which were then donated to students in need within the school community.
‘‘This year, under the young enterprise scheme, we decided to expand so we could scale our programme to more schools across Aotearoa, and to gain corporate contacts to source those devices.’’
It was there that Spend My Super came in.
Remojo Tech’s chief financial officer, Owyn Aitken, 17, said they were contacted by Michael Trengrove from Digital Future Aotearoa, who was looking for a programme to develop across the country as part of a partnership with Spend My Super.
The result is Recycle a Device, a partnership between Spend My
Super, Remojo Tech, Digital Future Aotearoa and the Spark Foundation. Yesterday, Daoud and Aitken travelled to Christchurch to run workshops with other schools in order to recreate the programme across New Zealand.
The group is preparing to leave school, but marketing and sales director Daniella Gibson said they wanted the legacy to continue once they had finished school.