Taskeen Adam is a Cambridge-Africa scholar pursuing doctoral research at the University of Cambridge. She was voted one of M&G’s top 200 Young South Africans in 2014. Her PhD is on the role of African Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in helping the marginalized, with a specific focus on digital neo-colonialism and epistemic violence. Her research helped her to pilot her start-up, Khwela, a regional online course platform responding to the needs of marginalized South African youth. Her journey to this topic started when she, as an engineer, founded Solar Powered Learning, with the idea that technology alone could improve education. Recognizing this flawed logic led her to pursue her masters in the Sustainable Implementation of the One Laptop per Child project in Rwanda, alongside pioneering the Mobile Education for Smart Technology project in India, which both focused on the sociological rather than technical aspects of implementation. These projects served to highlight that historical injustices, cultural imposition, and economic dependence continue to play a pivotal role in education.
