Kiwix4Schools Project
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The Kiwix4Schools Project was borne out of a desire to alleviate the numerous challenges that students in Ghana face when accessing internet-based curricula resources. The project aims at providing students the opportunity to access available educational information. Most Schools in Ghana and for students and teachers always face the challenge of unreliable Internet access along with the high cost of connecting and maintaining internet infrastructure. This situation has forced many students and teachers to rely solely on textbooks for learning and teaching respectively, without the opportunity to access extra reading materials or alternative forms of educational content from the internet.
KIWIX as a platform serves as a complementary service to education by helping to provide offline forms of the alternative resources and materials that the internet offers. This helps to escape the burden of the exorbitant cost of internet access for schools in Ghana today.
As stated above, the Kiwix4Schools Project aims at proffering a sustainable solution to the current challenges around internet access in Junior and Senior High Schools in Ghana through the installation of KIWIX together with a curriculum-friendly package.
The Government of Ghana through the Ghana Education Service has implemented various projects and initiatives that seek to promote Information Communication Technology (ICT) education in Basic and Secondary schools in Ghana.
These include:
- Building new Computer laboratories
- One Student One laptop initiative
- Furnishing Schools’ Libraries with computers among others.
The goal of the project has been to provide students the opportunity to access available educational information. This goal has however, not been achieved because of the numerous challenges that come with Internet access in schools in Ghana coupled with the high cost of connecting and maintaining internet infrastructure in schools by school authorities.
This has forced many students and teachers to rely solely on textbooks for learning and teaching respectively, without the opportunity to access extra reading materials or alternative forms of educational content that the internet offers.
The Kiwix4Schools Project was borne out of our desire to alleviate the challenges above, as best as we could.
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Kiwix installed at Wa Senior High
Background
In 2019 the project was piloted in some secondary schools in the Ashanti region of Ghana and the need assessment conducted showed that over 95% of the students and over 70% of teachers had neither heard of nor used Wikipedia and the other resources put on the KIWIX reader and almost 98% had not used or heard about KIWIX prior to our visit. The outcome of the survey and feedback from teachers showed that there was the need for such resources and so this informed our decision to properly implement this project in 2020, however this was postponed due the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic. This allowed us enough time to properly plan and design a structure and strategy to scale it up gradually to benefit other schools.
Organisers
This project is organised by Open Foundation West Africa
Team
- Eugene Makafui Masiku
- Jael Serwaa Boateng
Community Mentors
- Otuo Boakye Acheampong
- Maxwell Beganim