Four Palestinian high school friends are heading to California this week to pitch their mobile app about fire prevention to Silicon Valley's tech leaders, after winning a slot in the finals of a worldwide competition among more than 19,000 teenage girls.
For the 11th graders from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the ticket of admission to the World Pitch Summit signals a particularly dramatic leap. They come from middle class families that value education, but opportunities have been limited because of the omnipresent Israeli-Palestinian conflict, prevailing norms of patriarchy in their traditional society and typically under-equipped schools with outdated teaching methods.