Graduation

Yesterday was graduation day. Its now 3 weeks into the program and all the Digital Hub trainees on the Basic, Intermediate, Advanced technical courses and the the Training of Trainers courses attended a simple but significant ceremony to mark the completion of their efforts.

Each person who has completed a technical course gets a Camara skill builder certificate with various stamps saying which modules have been successfully finished. Some of the advanced modules include Linux Operating System essentials, Networking, Web Design and Hardware Maintenance.


Around 800 people attended the event yesterday. It was an incredibly positive and encouraging occasion with everyone buzzing!
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All 800 people were fed with Samosas and soft drinks. I honestly have no idea how this was organised or funded! The team below is the often unrecognised anchor team that worked in the background to make everything happen. It was a staggering logistical achievement. I see it as the 'Samosa's and Sodas' equivalent of the 'Loaves and Fishes' story ;-)



Its easy to forget how important it is to give recognition to people who have limited opportunity to have their abundant talents and potential recognised.


Dan, one of the Camara volunteers, summed it up brilliantly when he said he had never taught a class so eager to learn and so quick to learn complex tasks and challenges in such a short space of time. He was privileged to have been their trainer...



When people received their certificates their sense of pride was palpable.

Giving people back their dignity is one of the most rewarding aspects of this whole project. It goes beyond technical skills and knowledge, education strategies, development issues and even rational reasoning. Its the outcome of a simple positive human instinct flourishing in action.


Camara is working to have these certificates formally recognised so as to increase their value in the community. Even with out that formal regnition people are already getting employment based on the certificate. What people learn on the Skill builder course is extremely practical and by extension extremely and immediately useful to people in the IT industry here. Only this month one of the hub trainers was employed to deliver a month long Open Source ICT course to a school that the hub has just delivered computers to.

He is teaching 8 teachers who each pay the equivalent of about 10 euros to do the course. His transport is paid for by the school and the course runs for 2 hours every day after classes. In Irish terms the trainer is getting well over an average months salary for his work.

These kind of opportunities are beginning to manifest themselves more and more. Its exactly the kind of outcomes and outputs that we had hoped the hub would produce. The only thing that has caught us off guard is the speed at which things are happening!

Creating employment for people 6 months after the hub had opened was way beyond our wildest expectations....;-)