OLPC Ethiopia

2007 status: green
green

see also the Ethiopian Millenium Gift Project

Project

The 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.

Contact

If you are interested to receive more detailed information about any aspect of the project, please don't hesitate to ask

• Eskender Andualem (project manager) - eskender.andualem(at)ecbp.biz

or

• Dagne Semunegus - dagne.semu(at)ecbp.biz

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Status Quo: XO5000 at a glance

The current implementation of 5000 laptops follows a one year test phase in two primary schools in Addis Ababa. The 5000 laptops are deployed in 4 schools in Ethiopia (2 in Addis Ababa, 2 in rural villages): Two primary schools in Addis Ababa

  * Atse Naod
  * Menelik II

Two rural primary schools

  * Rema (solar powered) / Amhara
  * Mullo Sayyoo / Oromiya

Relevant Ethiopian Principles, Capacity Building, the educational concept, textbook availability & localisation and other relevant aspects are described in a handbook devel- oped and approved along the first year of testing (latest version available @ thomas.rolf@gtz.de). Roll-out-activities cover training (teachers will receive training on how to use the computers as well as how to implement interactive tasks in their lessons), implementation&support (digitization of content, distribution of laptops, execution of curriculum based education using XO laptops) and monitoring & evaluation.

The Concept - Capacity Development

Awareness

We create a conducive environment where high experts of the area share their experi- ences and officials from the educational bureau explain how individual efforts and skills would contribute immensely to the success of the project. We also participated in ICT exhibitions and school kids of grade two did a fine and convincing job of demonstrat- ing what values the XOs add to them. Local medias have also done articles about the project.

Rema: The rural village of Rema is the first African village equipped by solar energy. On Sundays, teachers of Rema have this tradition of paying a home visit to parents who do not send their kids to school regularly. After the training, teachers suggested to mention the laptops in their visits in order to alleviate the problem of kids enrolment and attendance.

Teachers

One cannot talk about a new educational tool for in and out of class activities and exclude the major part of classrooms – teachers. We deliver trainings for more than 220 primary school teachers in four schools found in Addis Ababa, Oromia region and Amhara Region. For many of the teachers, it was their first experience with computers. Ato Ashenafi is grade 8 Math teacher. In one training session, he was observed to mumble with a very angry facial expression. Assuming something must have gone wrong the trainer asked what the problem was. His answer was “Everything is okay. I am just angry that we did not have this opportunity long time ago.”

Content

In developing countries like Ethiopia instructive methodology is the most common way of addressing the lesson. In this methodology teachers use hard copy text books, this is not cost effective and even some times not possible to distribute equally with the total number of students. In order to minimize this problem initiatives like OLPC play a big role. It is also obvious that most schools in Ethiopia do not have additional reference materials which the kids can use as reference materials. Besides there should be a teacher who explains the different topics on the text books and as a consequence the kids do not develop learning by them selves, exploring and experimenting. In order to alleviate the scarcity and to support the current learning-teaching process on.e/ecbp (Ethiopia OLPC project) has collected the regional text books from the regional offices and converted in to the appropriate/supported format so as to install on the XO’s. In collaboration with Eduvision and Macmillan on.e has produced interactive teaching materials (Melepo and Macmillan) which will be installed on the XO laptops.

Addis Ababa

Oromiya

Amharra

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Locations

1. Addis Ababa

• Menelik II.
• Atse Naod
• Kokebe Tsebah (control school)
• Netsanet Berhan (control school)

2. Oromiya

3. Amharra

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Project partners

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.

M&E

Monitoring and evaluation

The aim of the m&e activities for olpc in Ethiopia is to assess the feasibility and impact of introducing `innovative learning' in Ethiopia consisting of capacity development, XO laptops and Melepo. In fact m&e serves to gain detailed information on the preparation (in particular teacher training) and the implementation phase (both in- and outside of the school). Through a variety of methods (see below) we assess the outcomes of the capacity development activities and the the teachers, students and additional stakehol- der's perception of the programme (awareness and ownership). Monitoring the preparatory and implementation activities and at the same time the per- ception among the stakeholders gives an insight of both the level of integration of the laptops in the classroom and the development of the social environment (awareness and involvement). Given these data the implementing team is able to follow-up processes during the whole duration of the programme, moreover to adjust internal steering me- chanisms among local stakeholders. In the methodological set-up we aimed at an comprehensive approach gathering data on both in- and outside of school usage of the laptops. Nonetheless the methodologies applied cover all stakeholders (students, teachers, parents, wider community, etc.).

For more details please visit: M&E

Status

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

The first deployment happened at Mulosayoo school in Oromia.

Powerpoint presentation by OLPC tech. intern, Daniel Drake, who visited the Ethiopian deployment from September-October, 2008 to provide assistance to the core team.

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.

More content

• OLPC Ethiopia/Cultural content
• OLPC Ethiopia/XO reflash process

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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 customized 708 image. 5K XOs now deployed in three schools. No School server right now. Intermittent WAN.]]