Former SW Missourian influences tech in developing world

Republic High School and Missouri State University graduate Melissa Sassi found herself at a crossroads a few years ago. After a complex international divorce, she awakened one day to discover her children were living in the home country of their father: Tunisia.

Shortly after her children moved, she secured a position as senior communications manager with Microsoft and discovered a chance to better the world through technology.

“One of the great things about Microsoft is that you have many opportunities to expand upon your role,” she said.

Tunisia, the northernmost country in Africa with over 11.3 million people, has a 42 percent unemployment rate. Sassi said there are 100,000 available jobs and 250,000 unemployed young Tunisians with college degrees. The two gaps that need filled are soft skills and competence with technological tools, even as simple as knowledge of the Microsoft Office Suite, she said.

Now working at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Sassi considers 80 percent of her job connected to her paycheck and 20 percent as solving one the biggest problems on the planet: access to tech in the developing world.  

“For me, I took that 20 percent and thought how can I make a difference in the world,” said Sassi, who last lived in southwest Missouri in 1998.

After her children moved, Sassi felt compelled to make that part of the world better for girls and for all children. She knew tech was the key.

Now, 1,000 volunteers are teaching kids how to code, even in the remote villages of Pakistan and Tunisia. The vehicle for change is a nonprofit Sassi launched a year ago called MentorNations.

“We’ve got a lot happening in North Africa. I can’t share it yet, we’ve had some very high-level conversations with government officials. Tunisia is not the only place,” she said, noting MentorNations currently is working with the governments of Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and the United States.  

Sassi and volunteers also created coding camps for Syrian refugees – 8 miles from the Syrian border – and an incubator at Polytech Intl., a university in the capital city of Tunis.

“We are empowering youth to launch their own companies, get their own funding, get their own access to their own mentorship and capital, and to become economically prosperous in their own lives,” she said.

Artist Brad Noble is having an experimental product developed through the Tunisian incubator for his Art of Everyone initiative. He described it as a small robotic laser device that fluidly follows the marks made on a tablet and transfers them onto a larger scale surface.

“Right now, they’re in the throws of creating original code. It’s a hack into the system,” he said.

Here’s the detailed objective: The laser device tracks a cursor on a drawing pad and follows the cursor in real time as an artist draws. The laser is projected onto a screen that is then receiving paint from the other side by anybody who would like to apply the paint to the surface.

Noble said it’s an evolution of the laser-guided painting he conducts with other artists and as teambuilding exercises for major corporations. The success of this project would allow him to conduct painting sessions anywhere in the world from his living room, he said.

Sassi has students building applications and websites, embracing their own entrepreneurial spirit, bettering their lives and, in-turn, teaching others the skills they learned.

Mohamed Zied Cherif, the lead tech evangelist for MentorNations’ digital literacy program, met Sassi through a previous project and helped start MentorNations through summer camps in a dozen Tunisian cities – “to help kids learn coding and computer science,” he said via Facebook Messenger.

After that, the team went to the Zaatari Refugee camp in Jordan. Cherif plans to use his internship with MentorNations to create an app that improves coding education with simple methods.

Dhia Elhak Guedri, a student leader for MentorNations in Tunisia, travels around the country teaching code.

“Today, we visited two isolated cities,” he said via Facebook Messenger. “You can’t imagine how kids were happy when they were using [a] laptop for the first time.”

There is also effort to improve internet connectivity around Tunisia.

“We will be partnering with 16 schools in Tunisia to up-skill teachers with curriculum, skill building and zest of computer science and entrepreneurship,” Sassi said.

MentorNations uses Hour of Code – a global initiative that has reached over 180 countries in the effort to provide a one-hour introductory course in computer science. Last year, MentorNations taught 2,500 kids Hour of Code and in a recent week, the volunteers taught 5,000 children. Other victories for the team include teaching the American ambassador to Tunisia through Hour of Code and securing approval from Salah Mejri of the Dallas Mavericks, the first Tunisian to join the NBA, to make a video showing him learning code. Sassi said the video would demonstrate to youth across the Arabic speaking world that anyone can learn the tech language.

Sassi said this project is in keeping with the United Nations’ global sustainability goals.

“I’m the glue to help connect them together and to the outside world,” she said.