The SOS Children’s Villages is an international nonprofit organization which has a vast presence that spans 133 countries and territories. Since 1949, this continuously growing organization has dedicated its efforts to providing for children who are abandoned, orphaned, neglected or are in perilous situations.
Guided by a unique four-pronged principle, SOS Children’s Village emphasizes the universal importance of a Mother, Brothers and Sisters, a Home and lastly, a Village in providing for children an environment that’s conducive for a healthy and vibrant childhood.
In the Philippines, its establishment in Lipa City is just one of the many branches scattered all around the country. Currently, the SOS Children’s Village Lipa is providing for an outstanding crowd of 134 children and youth in its Family Based Care Programme and is also helping 435 less privileged children and youth in their 2 nearby communities under the Family Strengthening Programme.
Amidst providing for such a big crowd, their Youth Educator and ICT point person, Derwin, shares that their organization remains to be well provided for, even in terms of ICT resources.
Armed with clone desktops and donated laptops, Derwin confidently shared how significantly helpful these technology resources were in their everyday activities. These activities include drafting reports, developing presentations for their children, and also, surfing the web.
However, one of the key issues that Derwin opened was with regards to their security. With some computers running on pirated software, the susceptibility caused an outpour of malware threats that caused their computers to slow down. Aside from that, it also strained both their firewalls and computers to the point of collapse.
All in all, these consequences caused by the use of pirated software eventually affected their productivity, and not to mention, exposed them to grave security threats, too.
Through TechSoup Asia, Derwin shares how their nonprofit organization was able to replace their pirated copies with genuine licenses of Windows software such as Windows 7 and Office 2010. An opportunity that helped them to both update their software, and, give their security a major boost as well!
With the consequences of running on pirated software behind them, Derwin also further used their experience to help teach the children to understand the difference between genuine and pirated software, and also, the consequences associated to using the latter.
Looking back at the entire experience, Derwin shares “It [software donations] helped us work in [a] more secure and more confident manner which served us to be more enthusiastic in dealing with IT works.”