A Dubai teen built a webinar school for girls in 20 countries
SpunkGo, short for Social Media for Good, started in lockdown and now reaches young women in Africa and Asia.
The pandemic closed a lot of classrooms. Netra Venkatesh, a teenager in Dubai, used the quiet to open one.
In 2020 she launched SpunkGo, short for Social Media for Good, an all-girls organization that offers free educational webinars from professional speakers to young women, many of them in remote or rural areas. The idea was to give girls access to skills and role models that a local school might not supply.
Gulf News reported in 2022 that SpunkGo had reached members in more than 20 countries across Africa and Asia, from Bangladesh to Ghana, and had more than 5,000 members. It was run by 30 young women called SpunkGo Ambassadors. In March 2024, Madhyamam reported the same figures, 5,000-plus members in 20 countries, when Venkatesh, then 17, won the Legacy Award at the 25th anniversary ceremony of The Diana Award in London. “It was an honor to receive this award from Prince William and Harry,” she said, according to the paper.
The model leans on partnerships rather than a payroll. KeyNote Women Speakers supplies the speakers. Through the Simbi Foundation, members record books for displaced children in Uganda. SpunkGo also supports an orphanage in the Dandora area of Kenya. In 2022 it was added to the Points of Light Foundation’s Inspiration Honor Roll and Venkatesh won the Diana Award that year.
SpunkGo’s own site now lists free life skills webinars, a global volunteer program and a “2020-24 webinars” archive. It is careful to say it is not a charity and does not collect donations on behalf of any charity.
The journey from a lockdown project to an international network is easy to admire and hard to verify from the outside, so the details here come from press coverage and the organization’s own pages. What is clear is the shape of it: a girl in Dubai worked out that a webinar costs almost nothing to attend, then built a way for a lot of other girls to attend one.
Anyone who wants to volunteer or register for a webinar can use the site’s contact page or email gospunkgo@gmail.com.
