OLPC Ethiopia

2007 status: green
green

see also the Ethiopian Millenium Gift Project

Project

The Ethio-German Engineering Capacity Building Project of Ethiopia (ecbp) is in charge of distributing 5000 XO laptops to Ethiopian schools. These laptops were donated to the country as a result of the 2007 Give One, Get One promotion, and follows on from successful trials of 60 laptops in classes in Addis Ababa.

Eduvision

Eduvision, a partner of the project, produces an interactive textbook activity known as Akili (formerly Melepo). Akili is written in C++ and uses Qt, WebKit and libqsugar. The textbooks are represented in a custom XML format. It is private, proprietary software.

Most of the Ethiopian curriculum textbooks are included on the laptops in the form of Akili files.

Eduvision published a report about the impact of Melepo on the 2nd set of trials in Addis Ababa.

Status

The 5000 laptops are being distributed at schools during September/October 2008.

The first deployment happened at Mulosayoo school in Oromia.

Localization

Translations

The first 5000 laptops are going out with no translations. This is not of high importance, because children are taught English from grade 2 and all school materials (except for the Amharic language classes) are in English from grade 5 upwards. Also, many aspects of the laptops are usable without being able to read the text, and also all of the lower grade textbooks shipped on the laptop are in regional languages.

Translations into Amharic and Afar Oromo are planned. Community involvement is welcomed.

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Primary Language	,|x|Language spoken::x}}
Number of Laptops	Number of manufactured laptops::5000
Keyboard Layout	Keyboard::OLPC Amharic Keyboard
Build	,|x|Software release::x}}
Date(s) Arrived in Country	,|x|Has received laptops on date::x}}
School Server	,|x|School server status::x}}
Deployment Status	Deployment status::Using highly customized 703 image.