ICT and information resource

Archive School of Open
#1

Just want to say Hi since i’m new here!
We set up an NGO in Ghana about three years ago called the Childrens Charitable Foundation (there
should be an apostrophe somewhere in there but it didn’t make it in the registration) with the aim of supporting a school and have been trying to launch a school in Ghana ever since.

I like the idea of free education and certainly the local community in Aplaku, Weija,Accra could do with it but quite honestly we found the area of finance challenging to say the least and got blanks on funding.

We changed tact on funding and have worked on various business models to self fund; so far we have the infrastructure of a school building up which can take about 30 kids and computers sent such as Raspberry PI’s which are currently sitting there waiting to be used.

I have always respected sources of knowledge since getting my hands on small booklets called “key fact cards” which got me through my Biology O’Level, out of the sink school I was attending and subsequently to University.

Getting access to Wikipedia is not a luxury for many children in third world countries due to poor Internet access, no computers or cost. Basically my thoughts as of 2014 is to forget e-learning on line or accessing say Wikipedia I just can not see how its going to happen in rural areas of Countries like Ghana. Instead just supply information rich computers that just need electricity.

I did some minor tweaking on the digital down loadable encyclopedia from SOSchildren making it searchable using PHP and MySQL thus making it more useful. If anybody would like to have an intro to it, I put up a rather poor video clip on our business model web site here:

http://www.accra-guesthouse.com/showArticle/30

Also for younger kids I resurrected Flashcards to help toddlers learn the alphabet (it uses python and pygame) here:

http://www.accra-guesthouse.com/showArticle/28

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#2

Hi Oburoni!

So, so sorry for the belated response.

This is really cool. Funding is an issue for other SOO Africa programs as well. Are you familiar with the CC community in Ghana? We have actually been talking to them about starting an SOO program but they haven’t had the resources or bandwidth yet.

The countries that have started SOO programs are Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and South Africa. More on them http://creativecommons.org/tag/school-of-open-africa and http://schoolofopen.p2pu.org/category/news/.

I think the Kenya program in particular might be of interest (http://schoolofopen.p2pu.org/training-programs/#soo-kenya) as they have experience running after school programs in high schools.

Cheers,
Jane

#3

Hi Jane

thanks for the info on CC, I shall look into it! .

Our guesthouse is beginning to show results and we have decided to fly back to Ghana on the 3rd of December this year. Currently i’m working on porting the guesthouse domain to an “Expats-in-ghana” domain using the PHP fatfree framework, so that the web site has a more broader remit for subject matter.

There will be a page for the guesthouse and one for the school we wish to launch. If anybody out there is going to Ghana and is connected to education please bear us in mind for accommodation that’s economical, conveniently located and has an owner who may be useful to
talk to in terms of free source computer operating systems etc .

andy

#4

Andy - this is really cool. If you want to discuss more about how this might fit into SOO, and possibly get connected to our growing CC community in Ghana, feel free to send me a note at janepark at creativecommons dot org.

#5

Also want to add @simeon for his thoughts!

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