Ethiopia To Benefit From Ericsson’s 3G & Connect To Learn Initiative

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With a quest to better learning conditions Ericsson has launched a network infrastructure and services to bring voice and data communications to the Millennium Village Project (MVP) in Koraro located in a remote part of northern Ethiopia.

According to Elaine Weidman-Grunewald, Vice President and Head of Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility, education is key to ending poverty and ensuring a better life for people. She father explains that ICT can play a vital role in providing access to quality classroom resources for both teacher and student, and fostering Social awareness and global understanding which has become a necessity nowadays in secondary education.

She further said that many of the residents in the Koraro area rely on the community clinic for healthcare, with otherwise little or no access to the most fundamental aspects of health care. Therefore connecting the health clinic in is one part of a new joint continent-wide campaign that aims to train, equip and deploy one million community health workers throughout rural sub-Saharan Africa by the end of 2015, reaching millions of underserved people.

The deployment of Ericsson’s cloud computing solution in Connect includes net books and wireless terminals that enable both students and teachers to access educational resources on the Internet, along with basic ICT skills training for teachers.

Community health workers will have access to internet connectivity for improved supervision, monitoring, and guidance on health service delivery

Awash Teklehaimanot, Professor at Columbia University and Director of Millennium Project in Ethiopia said “the Koraro Millennium Village had limited access to communications technologies, however, with the support of Ericsson, the people in Koraro Cluster has benefited from 3G connectivity and Connect To Learn facilities. Students in two secondary schools are connected to the rest of the world using Ericsson donated laptop computers, which will be critical

Ethiopia becomes part of the 11 african countries to benefit from this initiative ,others include: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania Uganda and Liberia.