OLPCorps KTH ETHIOPIA

School: Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden
Team Name: OLPCorps_KTH_ETHIOPIA
Team Memembers: Kidist Getachew, Bemnet Tesfaye, and Luelseged Asrade
Deployment Location: Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

Proposal
We are a team of three international master’s students in KTH, Sweden. We are applying for the OLPCorp Africa project in order to deploy XOs in a small primary school called Yekatit 23 found in the town of Bahir Dar, Ethiopia. Since all the team members are originally from Ethiopia, we will have no obstacle related to language barriers and lack of local knowledge. Our understanding of various problems in education present in developing countries is not a mere theory, rather it is more of a personal experience that we all have undergone through and it’s something that we would like to change. Our local knowledge and experience couples well with our technical background in IT as noted in the about us section below.

So far we had three meetings, and we have answered questions related to identifying deployment location and appropriate local partners and determining how we should localize existing contents and create new services. Currently we are working on other practical issues including budgeting and establishing a formal agreement with our local partners. Specifically, we are working towards convincing the Ethiopian Engineering Capacity Building Program (ECBP), which deployed around 5000 XOs in the year 2007(see [1]), to be our local partner. So far the main challenge has been getting the initial contacts in ECBP. The next obvious thing to do will be to demonstrate how our small sized deployment could be part of previous deployments. In order to facilitate this, we are receiving appreciable support from our colleagues at Bahir Dar University and from Yekatit 23 primary school.

About us

Our team consists of one pedagogical lead and two technical supports. Kidist, who originally gathered the team, is attending a master’s program in ICT entrepreneurship. She is interested in promoting the use of IT in developing countries. In fact, she is currently working on her master’s thesis project concerned with studying the value of ICT incubators in developing countries in order to realize new business opportunities and at the same time alleviating poverty problems. Working towards our OLPCorps proposal, Kidist is looking into issues related to budgeting, inter working with our local partners and identifying valuable and new services that the technical lead could develop.

Our technical team consists of Bemnet and Luelseged. Luel is a master’s student in Network services and systems department. With strong electrical engineering background in his bachelor’s degree, he is mainly focused in designing and developing communication systems in various layers. Currently he is doing his master’s thesis with the Swedish Olympic Institute in developing a system that can help athletes monitor their performance using handheld devices. Luel is contributing to our proposal by outlining new services suitable for the students. He is also looking into how we could reuse the contents and services that have already been developed for the XOs in previous deployments by the Ethiopian Engineering Capacity Building Program (ECBP).

Bemnet is attending a double masters program in mobile computing and information security. He is interested in developing secure context aware multimedia systems for mobile users. In the summer of 2008, he worked as a software development engineer intern with the windows mobile team at Microsoft in Seattle, after which he got a full time offer to join Microsoft upon his graduation. In his bachelor’s he studied computer science in the same town where we will deploy the XOs. He has been intimately involved in improving quality of education in his home country. In effect, before starting his master’s studies, he worked at department of computer science in Bahir Dar University as a graduate assistant and has a working experience in supporting IT clubs in local high schools. Bemnet is contributing to our OLPCorps proposal by networking with his colleagues in Bahir Dar University, and our potential local partners including regional education bureau and the ECBP.

For more info contact: merha@kth.se