One thing I have learned though is that it is easy to underestimate the local peoples ability. Perhaps the formal education that we have had makes us think that there is only one way of learning and because many of the people in the hub here have had very little formal education the assumption is they will struggle.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The thirst for learning here is incredible and people learn challenging technical skills quickly and most importantly without fear of making mistakes. When I watch the people here fixing computers and using command line scripts to fix operating systems bugs it makes me realise (even more!) how dreadfully limited and inadequate our western educational systems are and what a golden opportunity we are missing with the new technological tools that could address those inadequacies.
We travelled up to Malindi yesterday with some new local trainee trainers from the hub. The basic idea was to visit some of the Camara equipped schools through our partner in Malindi 'The Lindsay Project' and assess what training we could provide there when the Camara volunteers arrive in a few days time.
Its about a 2 hour drive to Malindi and with the need to organise accommodation in advance for the Camara volunteers, lunch etc we only had time to visit 2 schools (we were hoping to visit 4).
The local trainees were tremendous. They went into the labs checked the computers and made sure the labs were in suitable condition for a training course to be run.
As knowledge gets passed and as the Digital Hub grows in strength, local groups of trainers and ICT experts will make regular visits like this to clusters of Camara computer labs (like Malindi) around the country. They will provide training, maintenance support and gather information for research that will be used to improve the project further.
From what I saw yesterday there is no doubt in my mind that this will work.
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