Preparations for September trip

Progress

I’ve finally booked the flights today so that’s good progress with preparations for our September trip to Siavonga, Zambia! It’s exciting to have Sian, Luke and Malcolm coming along with us to share their skills and expertise. We’re very grateful to them for volunteering their time and funding their own travel as we do.

Schedule

We’ve set ourselves a challenging schedule with five teacher training days, two solar panel installations, and three installations of RACHEL elearning resource on Synology Diskstation.
So, at the end of our visit we hope to have achieved the following if funds allow:
1) One additional rural Primary School will have solar power for LED lights, a Raspberry Pi distributing RACHEL wirelessly and four laptops for teachers to access the resource. Read more about RACHEL here.
2) Siavonga Nutrition Group (SNG) will have solar power for women’s groups to use their sewing machines.
3) Three big secondary schools with power, will be able to access RACHEL from  Synology Diskstations.
4) SNG will have a Raspberry Pi allowing their office to be a hotspot for local children to access learning resources.
5) A large primary school will have wireless access over its whole site via additional access points.
6) A local Resource centre will have the resources of RACHEL via Raspberry Pi to make it a learning hub for the local community.
7) We will  train teachers in hardware maintenance, network security, programming with Raspberry Pi, using the RACHEL resources and Maths and English topics for primary children.
8) Finally, if possible, we hope to supply Raspberry Pi servers to four other primary schools.

Sample Costs

So, if you would like to contribute to any of our expenses, this is an approximate idea of costs, although any donation is welcome.
Raspberry Pi £36
Raspberry Pi server £80
Hard drive for Synology Diskstation £60
Ex demo Synology Diskstation from £200

We always welcome donations of routers, access points and working laptops/ tablets.