Employable Education for rural Ghanaian Students

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.