East African Business Week (Kampala)
28 June 2009
Kigali — Kenya, too, may benefit from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme next year.
Shakeel Shabbar, the MP Kisumu East is lobbying the OLPC management to include his consistency among the next beneficiaries.
The NGO is distributing XO-1 laptops to poor children. The move is to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children.
Kenya will be the second country in East Africa, after Rwanda, to benefit from the OLPC programme.
"We are looking forward to the deployment for 2010,"Migosi Oluoch-K'Osoreh, a personal assistant to Shabbir, told East African Business Week.
The programme will expose Kenya primary school pupils, like the ones in Rwanda, to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at an early stage.
From Kisumu, the programme will roll out to the rest of Kenya . Shabbir was part of the world leaders who attended the launching of the OLPC Corps and Centre for Laptops and Learning in Kigali.
The centre was transferred from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston to Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST).
At least 82 volunteers from North America, Europe and Africa are in Kigali training before they can be deployed to 18 different countries around the world.
"This entire project is about children and the laptop accentuates their role in society by becoming agents of change and not what some group of people has said in a curriculum," Prof. Nicholas Negroponte, the Chairman OLPC, said. Prof. Negroponte says laptops are tools through which a society sees what they cannot see and are a window into the global world.
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Hujambo.
Wonderful news! My organization, Earth Treasury, has talked with Maasai Chief Salaton Ole’ Ntutu and the Asante Foundation about designing an education program with them. We would like to use OLPC XOs in a way that would allow the Maasai to learn both their traditional warrior/herding culture and what they need in order to deal with the rest of the world. Right now, Maasai boys who attend Western-style schools are cut off from their people, and become strangers in their own land. And of course we have to educate girls equally.
Our program would also address the need for… [Read Full Text]