At Last, The Laptops For Primary Schools Are Here!

The long awaited Digital Literacy Programme (Laptops) will finally kick off in two weeks’ time in the first 150 E-Ready schools in the country. 

At the official launch of the programme in Roysambu Primary School in Nairobi, CEO ICT Authority and chair Digital Literacy Programme Committee Robert Mugo confirmed that the devices for the programme are all ready but would be airlifted into the country in two weeks’ time while another 1.2 million devices for the first and the second bunches of 11,000 schools each will be arriving in June this year.

In the next four days, our multi-agency teams will be ascertaining whether the selected schools are supplied with reliable source of energy, a select number of teachers have been trained, a secure storage facility has been established in the school and the environment is generally secure before the supply of the digital devices and commencement of the Digital Literacy Programme,” said Mugo.

Once the two consortia who have been picked for the project are approved after the pilot programme, they will roll out the devices to 22,000 primary school as from June this year. All schools are expected to be fully participating in the digital programme by June 2017.

Mugo said the validation phase will also see the teams engage with the community around the schools, especially parents, on the various issues that may have a bearing on the programme and their involvement in making it a success.

The 150 schools represent urban, peri-urban, rural and special schools derived from all the 47 counties, each county producing 3 schools.

The programme focuses on enhancing learning through the use of digital technologies with emphasis on online content. It starts at lower primary, class one to be precise.

 The Ministry of Education develop curriculum content besides training teachers in the17 billion shillings Jubilee project. On its part, the ICT Authority will oversee any technical matters and device support maintenance for the project that will be carried out in two phases as from June.

 ICT CS Joe Mucheru in a previous press briefing said that these schools are already certified and ready for the roll-out. The process will involve installation and testing of computing devices and softwares to access usability.

“The e-readiness tool assessed the number of teachers trained, electricity connection and metering, device storage facilities, appropriate desks and availability of a secure location,” said CS Mucheru.

Moi University and JP Courto, one of the consortiums that won bids of the project, will cover 26 counties while Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and Positivo BGH will deal with 21 counties in installing the devices and the digital content.

The government dropped its one laptop per child project for Kenyan primary schools in June saying it was no longer feasible and instead opted for a more integrated approach dubbed the Digital Literacy Programme.