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In October 2012, the first FAIR Denmark project in Malawi officially ended and a final evaluation trip took place. With a new and ambitious project in the making, we were eager to draw as many lessons as possible from the experiences of the last 18 months.
The overall impression was indeed positive: All five centers are being used and technical challenges have been overcome.
This being FAIR Denmark’s first project, some of our initial indicators and goals have been over-simplified, and there are still issues to be resolved before all of the centers are sustainable. Amongst many unforeseen challenges, however, we are delighted of how our Malawian partners at NICE and local schools and volunteers have sought to overcome such, and greatly inspired future projects.
During the project, both FAIR and NICE issued sets of recommendations through visits and workshops. At a local level, actors have come up with solutions to such recommendations the best way possible. Whether by making mouse pads out of cardboard or projector screens out of bed linen those in charge of the centers have opted for unorthodox solutions rather than giving up. In terms of security, our partners have also acted very responsibly making sure that all computers are being kept safe. Robert Blake Secondary School is the only school experiencing theft - and even there the guilt stricken culprits decided to return the stolen laptops.
The country’s fragile infrastructure is still a major problem for the centers. Faced with daily power cuts, a lot of flexibility is required in terms of planning. This has proven a big problem for the feeder school pupils, who travel many kilometers, often by foot, only to realize that their is a power blackout. This has affected the feeder school integration in a negative way. We were told that the authorities are working on improving the power cut notification system. In lack of better solutions, this would a least allow the schools coordinate more efficiently in the future.
The regular teachers are becoming increasingly aware of the educational potential that computers hold. At most of the centers, teachers benefited from offline access to invaluable open content such as Wikipedia and Khan Academy to improve teaching. This has convinced of the importance of updating and expanding the educational content, not just at the schools but also at NICE’s regional libraries where the computers can prove extremely helpful in providing civic education at a the community level.
Opening 15 new centers in 2013 may seem optimistic but the experiences from our first five centers have shown that despite tough odds, there is a future for ICT and Open Source in Malawi. We have been especially delighted to learn that, largely due to our correspondence with The Malawi National Examinations Board, MANEB, ICT exams are now platform independent and can be completed on computers running either Windows or Linux. The more people learn about the benefits of Open Source, the more they seem to embrace it. There is still, however, a shortage of computer savvy teachers in Malawi. For that reason, we are constantly looking for way to assist in capacity building and we are currently having fruitful talks with the Computer Department at Mzuzu University as well as The Domasi College of Education, Malawi’s largest teacher’s college, to name a few.
The lessons learned during this project have without a doubt strengthened both FAIR and our Malawian partners and there is certainly cause for optimism before the launch of our new project.
One of the success indicators of the project had to do with the number of participants, stating that 6,000 people should gain basic ICT skills. A report from September indicated a usage figure of 11,000 during one year - but with an inaccuracy due to uncertainties of recurring students. Conclusively, the report has given us a strong belief that the original goal has been met, however emphasizing the need of improved monitoring tools. For more details on the number of participants in the project, please refer to the usage report from September 2012.