FAIR Denmark goes beyond 1,000 computers

Preparing for the next project

During June-July and depending on shipping conditions, FAIR Denmark will kick off the next ICT centre project in partnership with Mzuzu University located in the Northern region of Malawi. The aim of the project is to equip 8-10 secondary schools with an ICT centre and to extend the experience gathered from the first pilot project.

Not least, the project will establish a main centre at the university of Mzuzu who will become the main organizer of the project. This includes offering courses to meet the new IT challenges of secondary school teachers and establishing a locally based certificate program that targets free open source software.

Changes to the model

Since our pilot project in 2011 was established, we have gained some valuable insights on best practices. These include:

• School management should prepare and document their own visions of an IT centre beforehand. Instead of solving unmet expectations during the project, we are forming an application phase in which schools and project management can share information to best-possibly plan ahead and get a swift and productive kick-off.
• Economical sustainability: Hardware is considered as a licensed provision, not a donation. This means that in order to participate in the project, schools pay a fee that can cover cooperative technical support.
• Certification of skills: The first project described fundamental ICT education, however such programs were rather sparse and undescribed due to a lack of clear programs and certificates.
• Software catalogue upgrades: The previous project was based on Ubuntu 10.04, while the next will be based on the more modern 12.04. This includes the possibility of students to acquaint themselves with more varied desktop platforms to gain a more agnostic or dynamic skill.
• Information database updates: Wikipedia will be copied for offline use as of 2013, and all media will be scaled to reduce the explosive storage costs of having such copies. We will also include promising new projects such as KA Lite, a Khan Academy offline project.

Over 1,000 Computers shipped

To date, 1,152 computers and laptops have been shipped by FAIR to Malawi. Far from all of them have been deployed yet, as 500 of them are still on their way, and another 300 are currently being deployed by National Initiative for Civic Education in the so-called Library Project.

Internally, we celebrate the anniversary as an expression of our refurbishment capabilities. Everything has been tested and sanitized by volunteers, and registered in our tracking database. We believe that given the resources needed, we now have the knowledge capacity to apply our model to yet thousands of computers.