OLPCorps BTH Ethiopia

About us

We are a team of two post graduate students at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. We are partnering with a local NGO, named Ratson, which is working on community based development program in the city of Debre Zeit in Ethiopia. We are currently in constant contact with Ratson to come up with a strategy to deploy the laptops and make the project sustainable.

Project Idea

Ratson's mission is to improve the deep rooted development problems of target communities living in the country especially Women, Youth and Children by promoting genuine participation of the target constituent and all stakeholders through community based rural and urban development programms. Currently, Ratson supports eight elementary schools of which four are in the rural part of the city of Debre Zeit.

Ratson has provided us with the list of schools that they supporting in the rural areas. The main challenge is the enormous number of students in the schools.

The following is the number of students in the rural elementary schools.

1. Ude elementary school - 3800 students

2. Hidi elementary school -3500 students

3. Godino elementary school -4000students

4. GandaGorba elementary school - 238 students

Based on the OLPC Africa requirement, Ratson has selected the Ude elementary school for deployment of the laptops. We are aiming to focus on bring change in the rural areas as they are the ones with the greatest gap with technology. We need to bring technology to the most rural parts so that the people’s perception and awareness changes significantly. We are currently trying to come up with a transparent way for selecting the students that participate in this project. We are also emphasizing on gender equality in the selection of students.

With respect to pedagogy, we have very little expertise and would welcome any assistance. But Ratson has promised to offer children educational materials that can be digitized and used with the XO laptops. We are thinking of participating more than 100 students in the summer learning activities. We want to emphasize on the students to share the knowledge they have with anyone they are comfortable passing on to. We are still brainstorming on this but our strategy includes considering to make the children pick a friend in their class and pass on the knowledge they acquire whenever they can. We believe this would have two main benefits. The first is knowledge transfer. The second benefit is that the knowledge gain by the additional students can be used to monitor the impact and measure the effectiveness of the project after the summer.

In addition to the schools, Ratson is engaged in financially supporting university students. We are planning to provide hands on training on troubleshooting and maintenance of the XO laptops to these university students. This will allow the children with an easily accessible local support in case of fixable equipment failures.

Team Members

Eyaye Bekele is a student in software engineering. He has been mostly working on system and web development. He has also been working with an NGO that is focusing on communication strategies to combat HIV/AIDS. Eyaye has been involved in the networking of the Ratson head office in Debre Zeit.

Daxious Mengistu is a student in electrical engineering. He has been mostly working in the telecommunication industry.

Contact

You can contact us at eybe08@student.bth.se or dame08@student.bth.se