Background
Nkoe village is in Meru, North District of Kenya, with a population of circa 2000. Meru is one of the 50 tribes in Kenya, and Nkoe is one of the many villages in the district and one of the most under-developed.
This Initiative was founded by Jacob Kaiga who is a local Methodist Minister who was born in this village, but now lives in South Yorkshire. Initially, this project was concerned with providing goats and cows to help the villagers develop various programmes of sustainability.
Since the launch of the Nkoe Village (Kenya) Initiative in November, through many fundraising efforts, we are pleased to announce that the funds raised so far, have reached £15,000. Therefore, we are delighted to be able to provide the villagers with 70 goats and 20 cows and also complete the multi-purpose building, which will house the Church, Education/Training and Enterprise Centre, Health Clinic and Dispensary and also the Community Centre.
Supporting Education
More recently, our attention has turned to supporting education with particular emphasis on young people. There is, within the village, a primary school, which is in need of urgent refurbishment, in particular the re-development of the eight classrooms.
Early estimates suggest that circa £35,000 will be needed to refurbish these classrooms, which will include providing new learning facilities within the school. In addition, we are currently supporting children who are moving on to secondary education where parents are unable to pay the annual school fees, which equate to approximately £280/year.
In addition, the children have to provide their own text books and stationery for school; therefore we are looking for further support in helping to provide this equipment.
We have worked with the children at Ravenfield to create a film about their school. This will be shown to the children in the Nkoe village. The film will be the first interaction between the schools. The development workers will help the African children create a similar film to podcast.
What's the plan?
We have received great support locally from Asda and also Rawmarsh City Learning Centre (CLC) who are playing are large part in helping us link Ravenfield Primary School in Rotherham with the village in Nkoe.
Rawmarsh CLC have kindly provided us with a laptop computer, video camera and digital camera so we can, via the internet, send information between the schools in order to help both schools learn about one another and their different cultures.
The role of City Learning Centres is to promote the use of innovative ICT in the whole teaching and learning experience. The opportunity to support such an ambitious project is very exciting for the CLC.
The CLC's role is to raise aspiration and attainment and education plays an important part within this project. The sharing of information between the school at Ravenfield and the school in Africa will be a tremendous experience of all young people involved.
Although the village in Nkoe has no electricity, we will power this equipment through a solar powered battery charger, also donated by CLC, so we are very hopeful that the link will be very successful. This equipment will remain with the school in Nkoe to continue their relationship with Ravenfield Primary School.
The information share will be possible through podcasting technology. This will be a huge challenge as the African school does not have an electricity supply. The donation of the equipment to the school in the Nkoe village will allow the project to continue beyond the initial week of podcasting activity. The podcasts will be hosted on the Rawmarsh City Learning Centre Website.
The development workers who are visiting the village and the school teachers from Ravenfield Primary will be trained by CLC staff on all the technologies and equipment needed for this project. The development workers will in turn train the African school teachers.
The development workers will be leaving for the village on 6th June 2006 where they will stay for 7 days.