|
Computing in Africa?
Yes.
The United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are important benchmarks of current development priorities, including increasing universal education and gender equality, and reducing poverty and infant mortality. Not only are ICTs included as one of the MDGs (Goal 8 Target 18), they are also important enablers of the other goals. As ICT specialists, we understand how ICTs can further all of the MDGs. The UN ICT Task Force has documented some recommendations of how to do so. Indeed, in areas with limited alternative resources, such as telephones and libraries, ICTs become even more important.
FluidIT solutions’ goal is to support the use of ICTs for development. In 2004 our founder, Carole St. Laurent, lived in a rural Nigerian town for one month, to explore how the community’s small telecentre could support their local goals. Carole provided training at the nearest Internet café on the use of Yahoo! Groups, weblogs, and wikis for knowledge production and collaboration. This was followed up in 2005 with a collaborative one-year solar cooking project.
Oke-Ogun Community Development Network (OCDN), which is very progressive to have started a computer centre at all, needed more training on how to use computers and the Internet for research, and producing their own local language training materials for their nurses, teachers, and community members. So we developed the Solar Cooking and Video Project to teach OCDN and Fantsuam Foundation how to create videos about solar cooking — a simple technology that replaces firewood with the clean, free, energy of the sun for cooking and water purification. How to build and use solar cookers, and how to create videos for local education, were the joint goals of this exciting project. FluidIT solutions volunteered three months of training and research support in Nigeria to this project. We are grateful to the Commonwealth of Learning for their generous financial support.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs).
They are appropriate for Africa.
|
|
