Empowerment through IT in Ol-Donyo Sabuk, Kenya

Partner: DISC Initiative, Kenya
Duration: 2013 – 2015
Donor: Foundation North-South Bridges through means of the German Federal Ministry for Development Cooperation and private donations

Tea and fruit plantations as far as the eye can see. The region around Thika, 80 km northeast of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, is one of the biggest areas for the big global fruit producers. For anyone who does not want to work on the plantations and is looking for a better qualified job, computer literacy is indispensable. But computer courses are usually expensive and only offered in the big cities.

In close cooperation with our partner “The Disc Initiative” we provided IT knowledge to more than 300 youth and young adults people from the community since September 2013.

Students in Ol Donyo are learning how to contruct a databse with PHP

Leapfrog e.V. supported the IT courses with finanical means and with technical expertise.

Leapfrog team is installing a computer network in Ol Donyo Sabuk

E-learning and jobshadowing

We have not only supported IT education, but also e-learning on hygiene measures, misuse of drugs, HIV/AIDS and familiy planning. Young women and mothers were a particular target group of our IT programme, because the usually have the poorest chances on the job markets.

Young women are a particular target group of our IT education programme

“Jobshadowing” was another module of the programme which enables participants to get first insights into the world of work and to apply the gained knowledge. Job shadowing was provided with the County administration, Kenya Canners, National Youth Service, ViAfrica and so on.

Training trainers on webdesign

For the more advanced students, Leapfrog offered a train-the-trainer course to introduce into coding and enable participants to design simple websites and share their knowledge.

The advanced class comprises the following topics:

Scrum Basics
Website & Internet Basics (HTML, CSS, LINUX, XAMPP/Netbeans)
PHP Programming Basics
PHP Standard Application Basics
PHP Standard Application and Framework Basics

Mike, a 14 year old student, had this to say about the course in which he participated last year:

“I took part in the IT course in summer 2014 ta the Donoy ICT Center. The course helped me improve my marks, because I understood that you have to make the best out of opportunities such as school and IT courses. I’ve learnt to write emails and texts with tables and graphs, and scored 313 points out of 500 at the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education. Such a result was unexpected only one year ago”.

Leapfrog regularly visits its projects for quality insurance. Here you can see one of our discussion rounds with a young mother who successfully completed the IT basic course.