Wi RED International - History

History

A San Francisco State University professor, Gary Selnow founded WiRED in 1997 while on a Fulbright Fellowship as a visiting professor at the University of Zagreb in Croatia right after the Yugoslav War. “UNICEF had donated computers to a high school but they were just sitting in boxes. We connected them to the Internet.” In Kosovo after the bombing stopped, Dr. Selnow noted that physicians comprised “the largest group visiting the centers.”

In 1999, WiRED began focusing on bringing health information via computers and the Internet to underserved and war-torn areas of the world. WiRED brought Internet access to the Balkans and contributed to the educational and research features of the Kosovo Internet Access Initiative at the request of the U.S. Department of State. “By 2000, WiRED was in Kosovo, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro and Albania.” In 2001, WiRED, developed 19 Community Health Information Centers in Kenya with a developmental grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). WiRED also installed the first non-profit Internet Center in Leon, Nicaragua in collaboration with the Massachusetts-based Polus Center. In addition, WiRED opened seven centers in Montenegro and six in Bosnian schools and orphanages. Soon after the first American troops arrived in Iraq in 2003, WiRED techs installed e-libraries. Physicians used these centers to access current health information. Since then, WiRED has installed 39 centers in Iraq. The centers offer networked computers and CD-ROMs “of the latest journals, databases and tutorials compiled from universities, government, pharmaceutical companies and non-governmental organizations.”