Sainsbury Trusts funds major East African expansion
Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts have given Digital Links a major boost by providing £130,000 funding for the significant scaling up of operations in East Africa. Through the opening of a regional office in Nairobi, Digital Links will replicate the successful Kenyan school computerisation project in Uganda and Tanzania. The project will take a long-term, sustainable approach but is expected to produce significant results within two years. This will include the deployment of 1,200 computers into 60 schools giving over 200,000 young people their first access to computers, and the training of over 700 teachers in ICT.
David Sogan, CEO of Digital Links is convinced of the importance of ICT education in African schools:
“Information and communications technology (ICT) can transform the quality of instruction and learning, and at the same time provide students with the skills to participate in a world increasingly dependent on this technology. African teachers and students are well aware of this, but currently only a tiny percentage of young learners in African countries have any exposure at all to ICT.”
The regional initiative will go much further than the simple deployment of computers, Digital Links is seeking to create a sustainable organisation in each country of operation, capable of distributing and maintaining computers on a national scale. They will also possess the contacts and expertise to secure their own sources of funding and donations of computers locally. By taking this approach, it is expected that the country programmes will be able to deploy a total of 5,000 computers, reaching more than 250 schools.
The funding will also be used to provide low cost teaching software adapted for each country and support each country to develop an appropriate ICT curriculum. Several hundred people will be trained in IT hardware maintenance and repair and school principals, boards and education officials will be briefed on the benefits of computers in schools. The regional office will conduct research into technical solutions to problems that affect affordable ICT provision in East Africa such as local language software, rural wireless connectivity and alternative energy sources.
Source: Digital Links