Dear Colleagues, Friends,
As our Africa Mission 2020 program gains momentum, our awareness of how critical a role technology needs to play (or does not play) for delivering teacher training to our refugee students using ‘innovative learning’ in Kakuma.
The lack of high-speed internet connectivity has severely challenged our program delivery and it is only through the continued dedication and ingenuity of our teaching team that we still managed to impact some 120 refugee students within our teacher training program in 2017.
Nevertheless, we did conclude that unless we found a viable high-speed internet connectivity in Kakuma, we would possibly need to curtail our ambitions in 2018 i.e. remote mentoring and coaching of our refugee students subsequent to our on-site delivery is vital!
…now for the interesting part!
Rather than try to solve this challenge in our own silo, we reached out to all Education Institutions operating in Kakuma. It turns out that all had similar challenges hence we collectively decided to work together to find a credible solution on this.
We then reached out to Indigo Telecom; which worked with us to find a viable, flexible and cost-effective solution delivering high-speed internet solution via Satellite…but now comes the breakthrough: for the first time, all key education Institutions agreed to collectively fund this pilot ‘proof of concept’ at two sites n Kakuma.
This pilot (led by another member of our team - Rob Hoevenaars) has just started, but the results are already very promising and more will follow on this.
I find it reassuring that this initial community response to a common challenge has led to each of us being more determined to work together on this as well as other challenges going forward.
…this initial ‘reach out’ has prompted further group reflection as to how we are able to leverage one other’s tools, contents, and experiences to deliver more pertinent and high quality education in Kakuma.
In this respect I am quite confident that this initial collective response will grow into other areas of education delivery within Kakuma; and that can only be a good thing!
Sincerely,
Bijay Dhungana
ICEFIL Vice-President
