How it started

UNESCO's Director General, Mr. Koichiro Matsuura, visited Lamu Town (Kenya), a World Heritage Site, in May 2007. Lamu is a jewel of Swahili culture and the oldest best-preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa. Mr. Matsuura was taken through the narrow streets of the old town populated with dwellers and donkeys to one of the local primary schools for girls – Mkomani Primary School.

Mkomani is a large public primary school for girls. It was established over 30 years ago and has a school population of some 1,079 girls. There are 29 teachers (24 are paid by the government and 5 by the Parent Teachers Association).

Last year only three girls from the school were accepted to National Secondary Schools. And only 43% of the graduating 8th grade class went on to secondary education. Touched by efforts to improve the school and learning environment, UNESCO's DG  offered a donation to the school. In return he was presented with a long list of needs including desks (all 1st grade children sit on the floor) and additional classrooms. Ceilings are needed for all the classrooms --on hot sunny days classrooms are furnaces and on rainy days pounding rain on the iron sheet roofs seriously impedes learning. An early childhood development (ECD) centre needs to be constructed and books are lacking in the library.

Sometime later, Susan Nkinyangi, Senior Education Adviser, UNESCO-Nairobi, met with local authorities at the Office of the District Commissioner and Lamu District Education Office and engaged in lengthy discussions with the Mkomani School Management and School Committee. It was clear that infrastructure interventions would not be possible due to their high cost. The School Committee felt that UNESCO should bring education innovation to the school by helping set up a computer lab. The School Committee enthusiastically embraced the computer lab option.

A large room on the second floor of a newly-renovated building at the entrance of the school compound that was serving as a library was designated as the new computer lab. The room has a new cement floor and a recently constructed aluminum roof. It only needed some alterations and enhancements to convert it into a modern computer lab.

UNESCO had found a ‘niche’ to transform the school. Current statistics indicate that less than 2% of public primary schools in Kenya have computers and only about 800 out of some 4,000 secondary schools have computers.

Of those schools with computers, Internet connectivity is seriously limited due to its cost and availability of sufficient electricity for computer usage. Mkomani school is fortunate to have a regular supply of electricity as it is located on a main electrical line from the island’s hospital. The biggest challenge was to find an affordable Internet solution with a good bandwidth and reliable access. The few cybercafés on the island are relatively expensive and unreliable.