Students as Facilitators

Paul, a Masaba Secondary School student, showing how it's done.
(Photo taken this week.)

"We are getting reports from Masaba SS that the students who come from this community are not learners but rather facilitators in the computer lab", said an elder (paraphrased here) during one of the community meetings held some months back.

He was presenting a case for why the community should continue to support the library and the computer centre.

Masaba SS, is one of the main secondary schools that students in Buhugu attend. It is impressive that the school even has a computer lab. However, the challenges the school faces are not unlike most other schools in this region:

• the computers are few, old, available during limited hours and rely on the unreliable power supply
• the teacher's knowledge of technology is limited (given the limited access to tools during teacher training)
• students spend most of the time copying down notes during class (given the absence of text books) which often refer to obsolete technology

With free access to the computers, and free to learn from the volunteers and each other, students who live in proximity to the computer centre are gaining practical knowledge that they then seem to be spreading in the schools they attend.

That in a way underlies the model of the centre: plant seeds of knowledge in the hope that they spread - exponentially.

On a related note: last week one of the leading dailies in Uganda, The Monitor, published an op-ed piece regarding the recently announced decision by the cabinet mandating Computer Science for secondary school students. It argues that "making the subject compulsory at school is a necessary first step, whatever the challenges".