Shabnam Aggarwal

Over the past few years, Shabnam Aggarwal has honed in on a specific niche market that she has a deep passion and obsession for: enhancing education for poor children over mobile phones. She started a couple of different companies to this end, in India and the US, and has worked with various professors, researchers, businesses, organizations, and changemakers to try to discover what has worked and what has failed in bringing high-quality education to the masses of children who have little access today. Shabnam believes that technology is not the be-all, end-all solution but an incredible tool we can capitalize upon to truly begin to level the playing field. She believes all children can learn, it is simply a matter of the opportunities they have to learn and how their learning connects with their lives and experiences.

Shabnam co-founded MILLEE in 2009, where she used mobile phones to bring educational games to children in rural India. Then she started The Teach Tour in mid-2010, which took her around the world discovering “why we’ve failed to educate children worldwide.” In early 2011, she started HobNob, a mobile-phone-enabled feedback mechanism that gives students a voice in their classrooms. She simultaneously started Hindsight Conference, a conference focused on all the failures it takes to get to the incredible success stories we normally speak about in public. Both HobNob and Hindsight are still in the works. Shabnam has recently embarked upon a new educational journey with Digital Green to help provide access to better practices in rural farming through the use of video.

Shabnam would love to connect to experts in education, edutech, mobile learning, or some combination thereof. She runs an online debate on the topic of educational technology’s proper usage in the developing world. Please contact her to join in.