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. 

 

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. 

 

This week, BOSCO is hosting our first ever Web 2.0 training workshop, on site at our office in the Catechists Training Center, Gulu.  We are hosting 16 young men and women representing 8 of our rural sites (see site locations here). 

They are going to be focusing on learning collaborative, web based applications like Wikispaces, Google Docs, and other social media applications.  Our users have already learned how to create their own blogs.  You can see their work here.

Upon completion of the workshop these users will return to their rural based ICT sites and will be the primary peer trainers, initiating the Train the Trainer process.

Please take 30 seconds to vote for BOSCO, a finalist for a $20K Better World Books' Readers Choice Literacy Grant: http://www.betterworldbooks.com/voting.aspx. Vote by Jan 20th! Thanks to Paul Miller at Better World Books for alerting BOSCO to this opportunity!

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.