This project has established ICT laboratories (with 20 PCs each), across 18 schools in Naivasha, Kenya. In total, the program has supplied 360 PCs and 54 laptops, teacher aids and impacted up to 6,000 students from underprivileged communities in the district, in the project’s 2 phases. Each of the beneficiary schools have received ICT infrastructure for the first time; for a considerable majority of students attending these institutions, this project has provided the first opportunity to access ICT. We have also provided each participating school local training and teacher capacity-building through our partner, ICDL Kenya, ensuring that the benefits of ICT continue to be passed on to students and to other educators within the school.
The project has enhanced the quality of learning, educational achievement and life chances of rural school children from Naivasha, by increasing their access to 21st century resources and the opportunities they enable.
Through strong motivation from the Kenyan Ministry of Education, Kenya has made a lot of progress with an ICT policy framework and implementation strategy, complete with measurable outcomes, time frames and a readily available digital curriculum. However, universal implementation is challenging given the lack of resources, poor country-wide ICT infrastructure, and limited electrical supply – particularly in rural areas.
With new regulations, local schools are required to implement mandatory IT training, currently they are provided a digital curriculum but not supplied the necessary technology or training to implement it, neglecting low-income schools. Many schools do not have the technological resources or trained teachers to effectively act on these new guidelines. This not only poses a challenge to wide-scale adoption of the new curriculum but threatens to widen any existing inequalities between institutions based on school budgets.
This project aims to affect this outlook through achieving the following community level benefits:
- Accommodating training, support links and learning amongst Kenya’s education network; sponsoring projects where centres of training (like ICDL) build the capacity of poorer schools to improve educational disparities.
- Helping thousands of students in Kenya gain competitive skills, access to resources and increase the life chances available to them through the benefits of ICT.
- Investing in and supporting local secondary schools, who are burdened with the greatest levels of student overpopulation.
- Equipping and supporting local secondary schools to meet the growing demands they face from horizontal and vertical stakeholders.
This project contributes to the following Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):
Our work contributes directly to Target 4.1 of SDG 4, by improving secondary school educational outcomes for boys and girls. Additionally, students are gaining relevant technical skills that will improve their job prospects, contributing to Target 4.4.
This project directly contributes to Target 5.B of SDG 5, since we select schools who have a similar ratio of girls to boys and actively promote the usage of equipment by both genders, ensuring that no individual is excluded.
By providing 10 secondary schools with computer labs and assistive technology such as projectors, allowing thousands of students to access information and communications technology, we are directly contributing to Target 9.C of SDG 9.
ICT Equipment used in projects is donated largely from companies; equipment is data-wiped and refurbished before being sent to projects. Therefore, this project is directly contributing to Target 12.5 from SDG 12, by reducing e-waste and allowing technology to be reused.
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