BOSCO Uganda

With the arrival of the SEACOM fiber optic cable late this year, many cities across Kenya, Uganda and the East African region experienced higher speed Internet connections at reduced costs. The cable landed on the coast, in Mombasa, Kenya and slowly made its way toward Kampala, Uganda.

Using a local ISP, Uganda Telecom, we received notice that the effects of the SEACOM cable's arrival in Uganda has finally increased the bandwidth we are receiving in Gulu. We were previously using an 256 kbps connection and now we are running at 512 kbps for the same price we were previously paying at 256 kbps.

See a recent article highlighting BOSCO's work in THIS Magazine: http://this.org/blog/2009/11/20/bosco-uganda-ict4d/

Click here for an update from Pagak by Chrisopher, director of an agricultural movement in the region and also a BOSCO Web 2.0 training volunteer. As the IDP camps close down, people are reconstructing their lives in their home villages and are once again accessing the land that provides their livelihoods through farming.

The newest BOSCO sites to come online in the last two weeks include: St. Jude's Orphanage and school (near the Catechists Training Center in Gulu); Lacor Seminary (secondary school for young seminarians); Lacor Primary School (where BOSCO volunteer trainer Jokondino teaches, featured here); and finally, Pabo Secondary school (Government run school) which complements the already connected Pabo Comprehensive Secondary School (Catholic school).

-BOSCO Gulu team

Representatives from Unicef (United Nations Children's Fund) will be visiting the Bosco office in Gulu today and one of our sites in Pagak. For the past number of months Unicef has been helping Bosco to fund some community training initiatives which are documented here.

Bosco is putting together a proposal with Unicef to help expand the network to a number of new sites in the Acholi subregion while also expanding on the effectiveness of our collaborative training efforts in linking local schools, health clinics, NGOs and CBOs and local government offices to our network of solar powered PCs and Internet.

I have been carrying out mobilization for training in Pabo (former IDP camp) today. The good and bad news is about one hundred people showed up on a market day; that was the highest attendance yet for a BOSCO training since the return and resettlement process started. Yet there is only one computer in Pabo Comprehensive Secondary School so we are unable with our current capacity to serve that many people at one time. Even a few distant schools sent members asking to be considered for computer training. The training brought regular lessons in the school to a stop as the teachers didn’t want to miss out either.

The school’s management is of the opinion that their school should get connected since they have two generators—big and small—which is conducive to accommodate the equipments. Solar power is also available here, but is only enough to power 2 PCs.

So far in Pabo Secondary School 16 teachers are registered for training with BOSCO. Unicef is pushing for monitored training and their representative, Richard, is meeting me tomorrow afternoon.

At the Coope community site, there has been a change of leadership: Latifa Monica is now the site Manager and a new structure has been developed. The land lord is yet to meet me and when we do we will sign the Rent agreement so as to open the room, hopefully by tomorrow. In Coope the volunteers are out to mobilize to begin formal training as well.

-David Aliker
BOSCO-Uganda Project Coordinator

Wikispaces was kind enough to profile the BOSCO wikispace on their monthly newsletter earlier this week. As you can see from the graph above, the release of that profile on Monday 9/28 coincided with a sizeable increase in visits to the site.

As we learn to get stories and proposals posted more frequently, we can help reduce the harmful isolation afflicting Northern Uganda by getting the word out ourselves.

We recently added an AddThis button --like this one:
--to the BOSCO wikispace, inviting the sharing of new posts in various social networking settings. This is an opportunity for all of us visiting the site to encourage others to visit. As the number of visitors grows, so does the incentive for members to post new content. Let's work at imparting energy to this cycle. Isolation is a bad thing; sharing is good:)