Elias Biryabarema
29 May 2008
Kampala — Celtel International, the parent company of Celtel Uganda has spent a considerably hefty $1 million on textbook donations, one of its flagship corporate social responsibility, CSR, programmes.
In Uganda the donations have helped bring tens of thousands of deprived school children access to critical academic material, rekindling their fading hopes and opportunities. Celtel's heavy investment in education is partly inspired by the experience of the company's founder, Mr Mo Ibrahim: a man who rose from the humiliating obscurity of herding cattle as a young man and exploited educational opportunities and his natural talents to rise to become one of richest and most influential men on the African continent.
"The philosophy of Mo and Celtel is that Africa is a great place of great people full of potential. What lacks in most cases is education and so that's why most of our CSR spending is biased toward education," said Ms Cesear Mloka, Celtel Uganda's Marketing Director, in an interview. In Uganda a total of 1600 text books have been distributed in over 81 schools in the last two years.
Celtel started the book distribution project in Tanzania four years ago, according to Ms Mloka, and coverage there has been expanded to include universities. The company has operations in 12 African countries and touts itself as a proud pan-African telecom entity.
"There all these people who believe that the best African professionals are those who go to universities in US, UK etc and don't seem to think that its possible for people to study in Africa and still be smart," said Mloka.
"well, we believe the contrary, namely that Africa has hugely gifted and intelligent individuals and if they're well exposed to the right academic environments they can turn out as competent as any other and that's why we're bringing text books to students."
The Company targets mostly struggling rural schools where students lack nearly all of the basic teaching tools and aides. According to Cesear, each year Celtel ploughs back 1% of its pre tax profits into community development investments. "We were the first telecom company in Uganda and that's a good record but then we had some slow midcourse there and then we bobbed up again. Last year we celebrated the achievement of one million customers. Ugandans have supported us tremendously in realising this and so we have to give a lot back to them," she said.
For the last two years Celtel has also been investing in an interuniversity competition programme called The Celtel African Challenge--a quiz designed to test the intellectual scale and alertness of university students. At its commencement in March last year 16 universities from Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania participated. This year's edition will draw participating universities from 5 countries, which is expected to raise the bar of competence for those participating.
The winning university gets $50, 000 while excelling individual students are offered $5000 each. Questions for the quiz are extracted from academic fields, general knowledge and world affairs. Students are particularly tested on their knowledge of day-to-day news and major world developments in just about every field of life.
"In these universities are tomorrow's leaders and so we think this quiz helps them identify their talents and strengths and it helps the public, too in discovering which universities are great in teaching," Mloka said.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 The Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
