29/04/2008

Galway, 16th of April 2008

Thare Machi Education (TME) is a UK-registered charity working with community-based partners in the developing world, helping to give women and children trapped in poverty more knowledge and more choice. Using cheap and reliable DVD technology in the users' own language, and by connecting with community groups at a grassroots level, TME is already working with eurotalk Interactive working to produce one hundred audiovisual lessons on key topics in the languages of the world's poor.

ALISON will work with TME to bring many of their educational programmes to the ALISON free learning platform. This will allow TME to make their content accessible to a massive new online audience worldwide, thus creating another distribution channel to engage with their target audience. In addition,
using ALISON's extensive education and NGO network, it is hoped and expected that TME can greatly extend the reach of its courses.

Commenting on the alliance, Steve Clark, CEO of TME said "ALISON is a terrific opportunity for TME to extend the reach of our educational content far beyond our current distribution network. The fact that ALISON is a "No Cost" partner is also a terrific attraction for a non-profit organization like TME, and the technical capability and speed with which our content has been enabled for access via ALISON is a very exciting development."
Mike Feerick, CEO of ALISON stated that ALISON was delighted to welcome TME as a free publisher on ALISON: "We had heard of the effectiveness of the TME videos in the developing world. What surprises most people today is just how much of the world actually enjoys Internet access. The addition of the TME courses is the beginning of our campaign to extend our health literacy portfolio which we intend to make very comprehensive and of course, free to access, over the coming year."

Both TME and ALISON agree that the need for education in these areas is tremendous. For example, life expectancy in Malawi in 2000 was only 37 years compared with 77 within the UK. Twelve million children in Africa have been made orphans by the AIDS pandemic, and in some communities women in particular have never even heard of AIDS, let alone know how to avoid it. So
far, more than 15 million people in Africa are estimated to have died from AIDS - more than the highest estimates of the Iraq war, the Rwandan genocide, the Khmer Rouge regime and the Holocaust combined. TME has active programmes in India, Kenya, South Africa, Cambodia, Uganda, Malawi, Nepal, Zambia, Bulgaria and Romania.

ALISON is committed to extending its free learning offerings, and is interested in hearing from organizations similar to Thare Machi Education about how together we can address global health problems.

ENDS (445 WORDS)

For press information:

Name: Mike Feerick
E-mail: mfeerick@alison.com
Telephone: 00-44-207-0993067
Web site: http://alison.com