<h3>ecbp is distributing 5,000 XO Laptops to 4 schools in Ethiopia.</h3>
A press conference will be held on the 26th of June, 2008 at 10:00am in the Engineering Capacity Building Program (ecbp) headquarters to announce the arrival of 5,000 XO laptops as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program which ecbp supports. The event will be attended by Ato Tenagne Baye, Manager of the University Reform component of ecbp.
ecbp will be distributing the laptops in four schools in Ethiopia – Menilik and Atse Naod Primary Schools in Addis Ababa, Muloosayoo Primary School in Oromia Region and Rema Primary School in Amhara Region. Among the criteria for selection for participation in the project were the willingness of school directors and staff to engage in the implementation, representation of less or least privileged parts of the society in the school and the size of the school.
The XO Laptops have been donated by OLPC and the city of Florence, Italy. The 5000 XO Laptops are valued at about US $940,000.
During the pilot phase of this project 170 teachers from the four selected schools were given OLPC teachers’ training. As the laptops have now arrived, the teachers will be ready to integrate them into their classrooms on the first day of school in the new term. In addition, the text books the students use for a variety of subjects were prepared in a digitalized format and will be loaded onto XOs, minimizing the number of texts needed in the schools.
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a project working to provide educational opportunities to the world’s poorest children. OLPC also aims to provide access to libraries of knowledge, ideas, experiments and art that others have created as windows into the world and as examples and reference on which to build. In the process, as children study new things and add new ideas and experiments, they will be able to update the knowledge they share with those around them.
ecbp brings OLPC to Ethiopia in order to provide children with new educational opportunities. ecbp is an Ethiopian program established under the Ministry of Capacity Building. It works towards creating employment opportunities for students through reform of Universities’ faculties of technology, TVET reform, improved Quality Infrastructure of Ethiopian products to be competitive in the world market and strengthening the private sector which ecbp considerers to be the engine of development.