Category Archives: News

Bbakasa School

Bbakasa is a remote rural school covering a large area stretching down to the Lower Zambezi. As such, it has many challenges. All the equipment was in place and since our last visit the school had received funding to add to the solar array.  Unfortunately it had suffered a lightning strike and the solar controller/inverter had been damaged.  We can not over-emphasise the need for earthing rods and lightning conductors  in the construction of schools where thunderstorms are frequent.

Everything else looked OK and we hope to rectify the problems. The Head Teacher is well organised and his staff were familiar with RACHEL and had used the resources in their planning and teaching. We gave them an updated Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and an additional laptop. We were keen to get feedback on the impact of our project and teachers filled in our questionnaire. This part of our visit is funded by The Waterloo Foundation.

Final Day of Training in Monze

On our final day of training at Monze Resource Centre, attendees were able to download useful resources for their schools and spend more time familiarising themselves with Kolibri and RACHEL learning platforms.

Some looked at the range of stories available in the local language Chitonga.

Each day 25 teachers from 21 different schools came to the Centre for training. They have agreed to meet there once a month to share problems and ideas regarding IT.

At the end of the day we visited Lushomu school. Friends of Monze have recently added a new block to the school. We were pleased to see good use being made of the Raspberry Pi they received last year and we swapped it out for the latest version of Pi and RACHEL.

LibreOffice Training at Monze Resource Centre

Today’s training session was based on LibreOffice which is on the laptops we supply to our schools. Training was well attended again and those who did not have LibreOffice already were able to download and use it.

We had a short break for soft drinks, biscuits, bananas and a stroll in the sunshine.

Health Help Zambia

While in Monze, we are staying at Health Help Zambia. Their parent organisation Health Help International is based in Newport, South Wales.

HHI aims to help individuals and whole communities; to lift them out of abject poverty when even trying to get the most basic food on the table can be a struggle. Disease and disability are very common in Zambia and HHI takes every opportunity to help improve health and wellbeing of people in need.

Help also includes offering forms of skills training to enable individuals to improve their prospects for the future. Many individual disabled people from near and far find their way to the centre in Monze seeking direct help with acquiring mobility aids, clothing, food or funding to support training or schooling.

Last night we went to visit Carole Nzila who is the Administration manager.

We showed Carole the Raspberry Pi server delivering RACHEL learning resources. There is a small library at the Health Help offices and we thought that the Pi  resources would supplement the books they have at present.

Technical Computer Training at Monze Resource Centre

There was a very good turnout for our first day of teacher training in Monze District. Most had brought their laptops with them but we had plenty to lend to those who had not.

After general introductions, Howard gave an overview of the courses this week.

Today’s course was intended for teachers with good knowledge of IT so it aimed at explaining how to handle things when there were slight issues.

I interviewed the deputy Resource Centre administrator about how they had used the Raspberry Pi server we left last year. It was very pleasing to discover that teachers and students from 13 schools in Monze Central Zone and 9 in Tagore Zone regularly used the centre for research. When they did, they accessed RACHEL learning resources via laptops and smart phones.