Turning Rural Civil Servants into an ICT users’ Club

Nakaseke community Library was established in 1997 under the pilot of Nakaseke Multipurpose Community Telecentre project which was executed by Uganda National Commission for UNESCO and the National Library of Uganda for a period of three years. It is now stands out to be the only biggest public Community Library in Nakaseke District.
The Library has a total of 8650 reading materials and it is the most accessed service in the Centre by mainly; school going children, teachers, health workers, extension staff and researchers and perhaps some few semi-illiterate farmers. This is because the biggest collection is in English. And it has been difficult to find enough local content produced in the native languages that can impart skills to the local community.
The Centre also provides electronic information on agriculture, health and education which is accessed on the Internet at affordable cost. Computer training is also another service which is offered to the community. In addition, the Library introduced a Box service to help far rural marginalized schools to have access to reading materials.
However, we observed that a lot of information is not published in books and can be access online. The Nakaseke Telecentre management discovered that some civil servants had limitations of visiting the Telecentre regularly to access desired information. We then thought that by introducing a social media platform on Facebook we could be able to attract and communicate with them effectively.
Ferdie and Guan (Nijmegan University-Netherlands)  giving Teachers Computers instructions
The reason why we introduced this service was mainly to empower rural marginalised civil society working in Nakaseke to have an opportunity to share information, ideas and based practices locally and on the global world. Initially we started using emails to keep the members of the club connected to one another and later we discovered that it was not interactive enough as some members were not participating well. We then decided to introduce the social media preferably facebook as the best platform to network rural civil servants from different institutions within Nakaseke District.
So far, 60 civil servants have been trained in basic computer application and the use of Internet. Before we introduced the social media platform to the civil society in Nakaseke it was pretty hard to bring all of them together. Now they can freely communicate to each other. 90% of the ICT user club members are employed by the government and 10% are privately employed.
This service was started in 2010 by training Civil society in emails and computer basic applications to lay a good foundation in the use of ICTs to the marginalized rural civil servants mainly Teachers, Nurses and Doctors, Tutor in Nakaseke Core PTC, and Extension workers. To achieve our goal we initiated a partnership with the University of Nijmegen in The Netherlands whereby each year two students (interns) are sent to assist Nakaseke Telecentre and Library in promoting the use of ICTs.
The Training led the creation of The Nakaseke ICT user Club which has brought unity and information sharing among civil servants unlike before when club members were still relying on emails as the only source of communication to one another. Each year we train only 20 people so far we have a total of 60 civil servants of whom 42 are male and 18 female respectively.
Robert Kinyenya,30 years the headteacher of Bukalabi Primary School he says that after school 8years ago “I lost contact with all my friends and working in rural areas it was very difficult to interact with them. Life was also very difficult, even interacting with my fellow teacher within the district was not easy”. But when Nakaseke Telecentre invited us for a training life changed when I was introduced to facebook. I was so amazed to find my old friend and new friends. Am happy to be the chairperson of Nakaseke ICT User Club..
Rose Najemba is a nurse in Nakaseke Hospital and she has some interesting story to share, “working with patients all the time used to make me tired” but when I was invited for ICT training at first I did not know how it was going to impact on my life! I was so happy to find my boss and other old friends.”

Nakaseke Community Radio : Empowering Rural Primary Schools to better grades



Radio broadcasting is a powerful tool that enables communication to many isolated rural villages and towns in developing countries. For many of these rural communities, radio broadcasts are often the only effective way to solicit important information to a large audience.
Most recently in Uganda, community operated educational programmes are being broadcast to remote localities in an effort to reach students that have limited access to educational resources.
Since its establishment in 2003, Nakaseke community radio has served as a forum and knowledge portal for poor rural communities in Nakaseke, a newly created district located 75km north of Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. Nakaseke radio operates in the Nakaseke Community Multimedia Centre (CMC), and is part of a piloted series of Multipurpose Community Telecentres (MCT) established by the African Information Society Initiatives to test and assess the impact and viability of MCT’s in rural Africa.
Education is one the station’s main programme foci and recently Nakaseke Community radio, together with primary teachers from government and private schools, started a special programme called The Radio Quiz Competition as a challenge to students to perform better and hopefully raise the low literacy levels and poor academic performance of students in the impoverished district.
The programme targets all schools in the district, which has a total of 95 primary schools (both government and private), and 13,401 pupils, with a 1:75 teacher – pupil ratio.


Pupils during  final Radio Quiz Competition (2012), modulated by Senabulya James

These schools are scattered in different localities, thus making transport to the radio station difficult and unfortunately limiting participation, but the radio broadcast bridges the geographical gap and helps educate the students who are unable to compete.
Radio Quiz Competition runs live every Sunday over the community radio. Three schools are hosted, with each school represented by two pupils in a live question and answer session that is conducted by a panel of teachers from local schools. These teachers set the questions and also provide answers and explanations if the students are incorrect – for the benefit of listeners.
Winning schools are often awarded prizes, mostly scholastic materials, donated by the radio programme’s listeners (parents), NGOs/CBOs and some local leaders. The successful school advances to the next round and this process continues up to the final stage.
Radio Quiz Competition is held every year and this year’s edition attracted 62 primary schools. Four schools were in the final, which took place on Sunday, 28th, October 2012 and ‘Semuto Parents School’ claimed the winner’s trophy and the prize, a bull; donated by the local Member of Parliament Hon. Sempala Mbuga Edward.
Since its establishment in 2006, according to an evaluation carried out by the District Education authorities and the District Teachers’ Association (DTA), the competition has helped in:
•Promoting confidence among the learners
•Raising the academic standards in Nakaseke district and Uganda at large
•Enabling teachers from government and private schools to share views and ideas related to increasing academic performance
•Enabling teachers to evaluate their teaching
•Promoting competition amongst the students, providing them motivation to succeed
•Exposing the pupils to an educational environment beyond the classroom
Other achievements:
•The programme provides educational drive to many of the pupils who participate in the radio broadcast, and they continue learning beyond the competition.
•It has been found that students who took part in the programme, and answered questions in front of the live radio audience, gained confidence in their abilities during the broadcast.
•Reading and listening skills have greatly improved amongst the participating schools.
•Pupils have also benefited from the free computer trainings every year provided by Nakaseke Telecentre.
Impact of the programme on pupils:
Since 2006, there has been a great improvement in the performance of pupils around the district. This has been noted after a close follow up and monitoring of the participating pupils and schools.
In 2011, the winning school of the competition (St. Joseph Kiziba R/C Primary School) produced the best pupil in the district (Namunswa John) scoring aggregate 5. The school was too crowned the Best District Performer by the District Education Officer.
Useful links in which this article has featured;
http://www.elearning-africa.com/eLA_Newsportal/what-community-radio...
http://www.amarc.org/documents/africa_newsletter/NewsletterAMARCAfr...

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