Orange Botswana, through the Orange Foundation on continues to award excelling students in the Special Needs Category at the Botswana Examination Council’s annual excellence awards. The awards, which were launched in 2010, are geared towards encouraging good performance amongst primary and secondary levels students who excel during the national examinations and rewarding them accordingly.
As disability and education are some of the pillars of the Orange Foundation, the company saw an opportunity to partner with BEC in recognizing these student’s hard work and excellence in their final exams in spite of the conditions they find themselves in. This is part of Orange Foundation’s strategy of supporting inclusion and appreciation of people living with disabilities, as well as to promote their access to education.
Orange annually awards laptops equipped with the Job Access With Speech or JAWS software to students who are visually impaired. This software converts written text into spoken words and reads out the info displayed in the screen through speakers or headphones thus allowing users whose vision loss prevents them from seeing screen content or navigating with a mouse to use computers with ease. In addition, Orange awarded tablets to students with hearing impairment. This was one way in which Orange encourages these students to incorporate the use of technology and innovation in their studies, in the process empowering them to have equal access to services and socio-economic opportunities.
