OMV Petrom launched the “Road to online school” campaign. The company supports with 90,000 euro the purchase of tablets and internet subscriptions to facilitate the access of approximately 2,000 students from disadvantaged backgrounds to school hours conducted in the digital environment. The campaign is carried out with the support of Petrom fuel stations, Mastercard and Narada, an NGO whose mission is to support education.

“Education cannot stand still and it takes a sustained effort at the level of the whole society to take the online school where it does not exist. The pandemic has strongly affected the educational activity, but it is up to all of us to come up with solutions to support students to continue to benefit from access to quality education and teachers to be able to carry out their courses,” said Radu Căprău, member of the Management Board of OMV Petrom, responsible for Downstream Oil.

“Hundreds of thousands of Romanian children have not had, since the beginning of the pandemic, how to attend the online classes. It is simply impossible for them. They do not have tablets, they do not have internet access and some of them do not even have electricity. When OMV Petrom came to us and our mission, they had not only the intention but also the concrete plan through which they wanted to reconnect to education, together, thousands of children from the first weeks of the partnership. While the school has closed, education must continue and just such partners make things possible again for children in vulnerable communities,” says Andra Munteanu, co-founder of Narada.

Narada aims to grant access to digital education by the end of this school year to 10,000 children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In just two months after the closure of schools in a state of emergency, Narada managed to connect 1,000 children from vulnerable villages and communities to online education. So far, over 50 Narada volunteers have arrived in 18 different localities in 8 counties, providing devices and internet to children without access to technology, aiming that by the end of the year, with the help of partners, the number of those who will receive support to be ten times bigger.