Samsung Electronics East Africa has launched the first Solar Powered Internet School (SPIS)in Kenya in a bid to improve the quality of education provision regardless of the schools ability to provide of learning material, electricity connectivity and ICT in public school.
The children of Arap Moi School in Kenya’s Kajiado County will now have access of internet in their school, courtesy of Hope for Children initiative of Samsung electronics. This project will not only be beneficial not only to the Arap Moi School but it will benefit 9 other schools nearby schools.
Samsung’s Vice President for East and Central Africa, Robert Ngeru, describes this initiative as being in line with company’s global vision of strengthening the minds and fostering the creativity of young people as well as a holistic effort on education transformation in Africa.
“At Samsung, we are keen to support societies and their communities in many different ways and the Solar Powered School will provide better knowledge transfer, learning and research opportunities both for learners and teachers alike, as well as equip them with the necessary employable skills for the future,” he said.
This SPIS is a 40-foot shipping container that Samsung equips with 24 Samsung Laptops plus one for the teacher, a multi-purpose Samsung printer, a 50 inch electronic board, a server, internet access and the solar panels. All this devices are optimized for the use in solar –powered environment and it cost Ksh. 12.9 million ($146,997)
In the deputy president’s speech, he expressed his appreciation to Samsung for the SPIS saying: “the integration of ICT in our education system will undoubtedly raise the quality of education in our country. Teachers will have been empowered to engage in more research while preparing their lessons and the students will have a chance to gain more knowledge form online content.”
Samsung has partnered with Intel and the Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS) to preinstall content on the computers. Two teachers from Arap Moi School were amongst several teachers that were trained by KERIS in Korea for two weeks.
In this project, Samsung has also teamed up with Safaricom so as to provide internet to the SPIS to facilitate connectivity to the world of information and research. Safaricom will provide the internet for five years.