Education Ghana Project #20491

Employable Education for rural Ghanaian Students

by The Turing Trust

Project Report | Nov 23, 2016
The latest updates from Ghana, live from Nicola!

By Nicola Turing | Project Leader

WELCOME!

Nicola and John Turing have just returned from an amazing 3 week trip to Ghana. They were hosted by our Ghana country director, Edmund Pinto (Eddie) and were able to visit many of the ICCES and other schools and were universally made to feel welcome.

Meeting the team from ICCES Head Office

From left to right: Engr. Godwin AY Kudese (Director), Frederick Bekoe Addo (General Services Manager), John Turing (Turing Trust), Theresa Agbesi (Administrator), David Mensah (Head of Policy, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation), Nicola Turing (Turing Trust), Edna Yayra (Head of Human Resources), Michael Strongbow (Head of Training), Janet Fiadzigbe (Accountant), Dominic Nuoh (Deputy Accountant).

Visiting ICCES with computer labs

The Turing Trust team visited several ICCES with computer labs (the photos below are of Ngleshie Amanfro ICCES, Akrofufu ICCES and of the students and teachers from Tetrefu ICT club). Other ICCES visited included Kedzi, Asafora, Assin Jakai and Afoako ICCES. Many of the ICCES are in very rural areas and we were certainly glad that we were travelling in a 4x4!

Visits to assess readiness to receive computers
Sogakope ICCES have a new facility under construction, but our discussions revealed that this had been delayed and so it was agreed to site the computer lab in the current premises, in a room that is on loan from the District Assembly.

Woe ICCES have recently been given new buildings vacated by a Junior High School that has moved to new premises. Both ICCES needed to complete some minor electrical works and purchase surge protectors and their computer labs will be set up as soon as this has been done.

So how can you possibly summarise such a packed visit? The welcome and hospitality wherever we visited was fantastic. There is no doubt that there is an appetite to use computers for improving education, but that there is plenty we still need to do. ICCES and their students continue to face significant financial challenges and some ICCES need support to provide permanent buildings for their computer labs. We need to continue to provide adequate training for all staff and to embed the use of computers and e-learning to support all areas of the curriculum. Whilst all schools we visited were very keen to be able to access the internet, the reality is that this is likely to be many years away, but by making effective use of RACHEL, we can at least give students access to a vast wealth of resources in the interim.

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Aug 24, 2016
Training Update from Ghana

By James | Project Leader

(A computer lab at Afoako ICCES in Ashanti region)

From a donation of two laptops to a single school in 2010 to 392 computers in early 2015, The Turing Trust has seen remarkable growth in our computer reuse scheme. Many students across Ghana are studying IT without ever having seen a computer. This creates an ongoing demand for our services while the ever-changing UK electronics market causes ever-more rapid upgrades, creating an ongoing supply of donations. What we hope to achieve with this project is increased efficiency and sustainability in our logistics system, better connecting supply and demand and enabling us to reach more schools.

After wiping all computers to ensure there is no trace of information about the previous user, we install a new operating system and several offline educational recourses including syllabi, textbooks, first aid manuals, and the Rachel system.

The Turing Trust trains all teachers before donation of computers to schools. In this way we hope to maximize their impact. With the development of our training scheme we have been able to ensure that all schools have teachers well trained in how to maintain and use our educational software to its full potential. They are taught how best to use this equipment alongside the national curriculum, ensuring that our software can complement their regular classes. In our training sessions held at Accra, Kumasi and Tamale we were able to give the teachers confidence in IT that they can pass on to their students. Close interaction with the teachers helped us to understand their current capabilities and weaknesses in teaching IT. We have received very positive feedback from these training sessions. This has motivated us to continue to develop our training techniques and expand our teaching programmes.

Most recently, The Turing Trust were able to train 18 ICT teachers from the Upper East, Upper West and Northern regions in basic computer maintenance and safety to enable them to maintain the computers we have supplied.

Based on feedback from the participants and the online questionnaire survey, we discovered the necessity of repeating this training through the other seven regions. All 50 schools across the country who participated in this survey lacked essential maintenance skills, leaving computers vulnerable to easily avoidable breakdowns.

The team at The Turing Trust again says thank you very much for your continued support.

(Teachers from 20 schools in the Volta)

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May 31, 2016
Big developments for our off-grid IT plans

By James | Director

The last couple of months have been busy, but here are some of the highlights.

Welcome to our new employees!

We are delighted to Jamie McDonald as the first Turing Trust part-time employe. Jamie is the operations manager at our Edinburgh hub. Jamie has already brought great innovation to the Turing Trust and set us up to be able to receive Bitcoin and Litecoin donations.

This means that the Edinburgh Hub is now open 3 days a week, which makes it much easier to accept donations and for volunteers to work whenever they are able to.

Promoting Turing Trust ideals and activity

James has presented the work we do and in particular our plans for the SolarBerry at a dinner at Buckingham Palace and at the Clinton Global Initiative University in California with a mention of the plans for the SolarBerry (off grid computer laboratory) in Bill Clinton’s closing remarks.

The SolarBerry prototype works (even in the Edinburgh sunshine)

Andrew Clark took advantage of a sunny day at the end of April to demonstrate the SolarBerry prototype. There was enough solar energy from 2 solar panels to power the Raspberry Pi and allow several people to connect to RACHEL on their smartphones.

Thank you for all your support

Thanks to all those who have supported the Turing Trust with donations and goods in kind in recent months, particularly to Cliff Robertson and Jim Wilson who hired a van from Enterprise and drove over 1000 miles to collect computers for the Turing Trust. A great contribution to the next shipment.

What is happening in Ghana?

We now have 26 functioning computer labs in ICCES with another 14 in preparation for set up this year. The Turing Trust has also set up another 13 computer labs at various Primary and Junior High Schools. Word of our success is getting round and we are now getting at least 5 requests for computer laboratories every month!

Edmund Pinto has been working with Jacqui and Ben from OLT to evaluate the mobile app they are developing for the continuous professional development of teachers with the needs of Africa in mind. We are also delighted to welcome Judy Palmer, who has recently joined us as a volunteer, and will be helping develop e-learning resources for students learning English in the ICCES, that we can then deliver using RACHEL.

Cliff Hunter has just arrived in Ghana where he is volunteering for 2 weeks and will be helping to set up and configure several systems to be used as a RACHEL server.

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