Schools-Based Community Networking in Uganda

Abstract

Our NGO, Uconnect1, is distributing hundreds of refurbished computers to dozens of mostly rural primary and secondary schools in Uganda, training teachers and students to set up their own computer labs, assisting them in getting connected to the Internet and guiding them to open their schools’ labs to the parents and local community after hours on a fee-paying basis. We have attempted to develop each aspect of the project’s operations in such a way that it is sustainable, scalable and reproducible. This article will describe strategies we have used in our quest to make the Internet available to the widest number of people, and point out bottlenecks that challenge us to overcome.