By Our Reporter
Uganda’s pioneer ‘One Student, One Laptop’ program, aimed at enlarging Ugandan students’ access to and ability to afford functional laptops, was over the weekend launched at Speke Resort Munyonyo.
Attended by key stakeholders, the launching ceremony was presided over by Privatization & Investments Minister Evelyn Anite who thanked Maticent Industries Ltd (a local Ugandan technology firm) for coming on board to partner with the government of Uganda to manufacture and make available tens of hundreds of affordable, high-quality laptops for the benefit of Ugandan students, especially those from economically-disadvantaged backgrounds and parts of the country.
To be implemented as a Public-Private Partnership (PPP), the ‘One Student, One Laptop’ intervention is aimed at availing Ugandan students brand new laptops which they will affordably be procuring under heavily discounted and relaxed payment terms. At the company’s Kololo offices, a student will be verified to be enrolled at a given University or academic institution, which becomes the basis for him or her to pay an initial instalment equalling 20% of the laptop’s value and then walk away with the gadget.
The learner will then get the laptop and begin using it (for online virtual learning etc) while paying up the remaining 80% in instalments over a period of two years. This will facilitate online learning, research, data collection and report-writing and timely submission by students especially in Universities and other institutions of higher learning.
Anite explained that the program will be implemented by Maticent Industries Ltd in close collaboration with the relevant GoU Ministries namely Education and that of ICT. Universities like Makerere and others will equally have a very big role to play in the operationalization of the ‘One Student, One Laptop’ PPP program.
Minister Anite thanked Maticent for the timely intervention which she said is not only consistent with the President’s broader vision of increasing access to affordable ICTs as an enabler for inclusive economic transformation but will also greatly help to diminish the digital gap and related inequalities regarding access to life-changing ICTs.
The same PPP was also celebrated for it’s potential to accelerate local innovations and job creation. Even lecturers and tutors will be able to benefit from this arrangement by being enabled to access high quality laptops under flexible payment arrangements, Anite clarified. Beneficiaries will have to come from all academic institutions across the country, and not only in Kampala.
UWESO BENEFITS
At the same event, a total of 15 brand new laptops were donated to charity organization Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans (UWESO) to facilitate learning, research, data collection, storage and report-writing plus other learning processes at its schools and learning centers scattered in different parts of the country.
At its schools in places like Migera in Nakasongola and Masulita-Kakiri in Wakiso district, UWESO supports and facilitates learning for hundreds of students from economically-disadvantaged backgrounds. The 15 laptops will go a long way in improving learning processes and outcomes at such learning centers under UWESO where modest fees is charged to learners who would otherwise not have had chance to be at school.
The larger majority of the children at the UWESO schools study for totally free, without paying anything, because many of them are orphans hailing from some of Uganda’s financially most vulnerable regions and families with no financial means.
A UWESO delegation, led by Chief Executive Officer Jolly Kaguhangire, was at hand to receive the 15 laptops donation from Maticent Industries Ltd during the Munyonyo launching event.
Besides Evelyn Anite, other eminent speakers at the Munyonyo launch included Victoria University DVC Prof Augustine Ifelebugu (who saluted the ‘One Laptop, One Student’ innovation as one that will ensure that physical distance is no longer a barrier to learning through facilitating online/virtual learning).
The other speaker was Maticent’s CEO and founder Eragy Bashonga Arapha who explained several large-scale ICT projects the company is currently undertaking in different countries across the region.
It was also revealed that Maticent currently gainfully employs roughly 100 Ugandans and has capacity to output 2,500 laptop devices per month. Bashonga called on Ugandan students to take advantage of the Company’s Kololo office to have their laptop-acquisition applications processed.
