At this challenging time of Covid-19 virus, we continue to look for the good and give thanks for the positives. With some extra time on her hands this year, Elimu advisory board member, Jane in England, so kindly offered to do something to help us out in Kenya and took on an online fundraising campaign amongst friends, family, and colleagues. She had even planned to make her own birthday party a means to support the campaign – but the event had to be canceled in respect of Corona Virus protocols.
The fundraising was aimed at replacing the digital tools at Elimu Resource Centre, so that children can keep their hope alive! At Elimu’s digital education resource centre children get access to resources they don’t have in the classroom or at home – like e-textbooks and digital mathematics tutorials and they can work in a bright friendly study environment. That means they get what they need to improve in their studies, gain digital skills and hope for decent work in their future. The Centre welcomes over 15,000 study visits from children each year. We urgently needed to replace laptops and desktops, as well as paper books which have been depleted from our shelves. We also need to add good study tables for our children to work from.
The fundraising event targeted $5,000, and we really thank God for making it a success! Jane managed to mobilize her friends and well-wishers to donate, despite the great challenge of the Covid-19 virus that hindered her from having her fundraising event. The online campaign still brought forth the targeted amount we needed to become part of the ongoing fundraising activities of GlobalGiving.org, a global fundraising platform. With that success Elimu is now part of Global Giving and donors from outside Canada, can make donations to Elimu by CLICKING HERE:
“Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.”
We’ll be updating the campaigns from time to time, for now we continue to raise money towards our digital needs at Elimu Resource Centre. The target of $5,000 was what we needed to achieve in order to join the Global Giving platform. Our overall target for digital equipment is $13,000 (or £10,000).
We are so grateful to all those who have supported us in one way or the other and enabled us to serve the Malindi community to the best of our knowledge. During these hard times where all children are at home instead of being in school, we are looking at how we can give students during Covid-19 shut downs access to our servers at Elimu Resource Centre so that they can continue their learning at home. Smartphones, tablets, SmartTVs, laptops – all of these can be used to access the open source educational content on the EdTech platform, Kolibri. We began by using Kolibri in-class where it is providing an excellent solution to content for the government issued tablets. Now we’re finding we have a solution to keep learning going from home. Thanks to our partners at Learning Equality for making that possible.
Below are links to news clips of the interview we had in regards to our plan of helping children to access e-learning while at home: