BOSCO Uganda

BOSCO hosted staff from Unicef Madagascar today who were on a visit to assess rural connectivity solutions that are being implemented in Uganda in hopes of replicating these solutions back in Madagascar.  BOSCO connects schools, community centers, health clinics, and CBO/NGO outstations in rural areas to a network of high speed Internet that is transmitted via long-range WiFi.  We also implement the use of solar panels to power low-power PCs at each of our sites.

Unicef Madagascar hopes to return to Madagascar and implement some of the same rural connectivity solutions that are already underway in BOSCO's network.  BOSCO is continuing to work with Unicef Uganda to finalize a 2-year partnership that will allow BOSCO to double its network presence across northern Uganda, including entering Kitgum and Pader Districts to the East.  BOSCO is proud to work in partnership with multinational organizations like Unicef who have the capacity to take best practices in rural connectivity and make them widely available in new locations. 

Hi, all.  I'm Tom Loughran, a science educator from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, USA.  I've been involved in the BOSCO project for the past four years, but haven't yet been to Northern Uganda.  I'm heading to Gulu shortly, and want to be able to post updates from that trip.  So I've enabled an email address for posting text and pictures by email.  This is a test of that system.  There are good reasons to be able to email pictures and text to a blog: that blog has followers; it is embedded in various sites by rss feeds; and it is publicly searchable as a blog post.  So emailing a story to the bosco-uganda blog is a great way to communicate with a lot more people than you might think to include in an email. More to come soon!

David Aliker and Stella Akiteng, both Project Coordinators for BOSCO-Uganda, accompanied Unicef representatives from the Gulu zonal office to visit a number of our BOSCO sites today, including, Lacor, Pagak, Pabo, Coope, and Unyama (see our site map here). 

We are just winding up our smale scale funding project with Unicef.  Most of the project was geared toward adding a few new sites to our network and implementing, for the first time, our grass-roots Web 2.0 training program at each site.  In this program, youth at each site learn to train each other to use valuable collaboration tools on the web, including:  email, Wikispaces, blogging, and other social media.