Giga: Connecting Every Child

In June 2023, Chris Fabian, a tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Giga (UNICEF) and his colead from the ITU, Alex Wong, announced a new strategic move to establish the organisation’s managerial headquarters in Geneva and locate its tech headquarters in Barcelona, a major development for the joint initiative between the two UN agencies. With a goal to connect every child in the world to the internet, since 2019 Giga had mapped the location of over 2 million schools on its open-source platform using geospatial satellite mapping. It had been deployed in more than 30 countries, bringing over 2.1 million children and young people online. Even so, in 2023 over 2.6 billion people worldwide (many of them children) remained offline. Within the next three months Chris and Alex had to develop a strategy to integrate the two headquarters, reconcile the maverick structure with the UN’s bureaucratic procedures, and leverage the ecosystem in Geneva for optimal global and local impact. They needed to show that a start-up born out of the UN really could change the world.

The case setting is a pivotal moment for a social initiative that is scaling globally. The key protagonist faces decisions of a social entrepreneurship nature (related to start-up governance, scaling through ecosystem partnerships, and managing dual headquarters) as part of a mission to bring equality through schools’ connectivity, which is made more complex by being anchored in two UN agencies. The teaching objectives are to introduce participants to the governance of social intrapreneurship initiatives, highlight the importance of innovation in solving ‘grand challenges’, and understand the role of ecosystems when scaling these initiatives globally.