Today’s an exciting day!

I’ll be speaking at the Skoll World Forum, a free online event where top-notch social entrepreneurs will discuss a wide set of social issues, especially racial and climate justice. Nexleaf’s Nithya Ramanathan and I will discuss how to recognize and oppose data colonialism in the nonprofit sector in our session “Decolonizing Data.” The Forum is free to all!

But that’s not all. I am proud to announce that, after more than a year of collaboration with Child Helpline International (CHI) and child helplines in Zambia and South Africa, Tech Matters is officially launching its first social enterprise: Aselo.

Aselo is a cloud-based platform that will widen helplines’ ability to communicate with children in need — not just via voice calls but also via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SMS, webchat, and more:

I’d like to give my deepest thanks to everyone who made this possible. The Aselo platform is the result of a long collaboration between our development team and the child helplines that lent us their trust and expertise. Meanwhile, funding was provided by CHI (whose founder, Jeroo Billimoria, lit the spark for the project), the End Violence Fund, Twilio.org, Facebook, the Jenesis Group, and Schmidt Futures.