Kibera, Kenya, December 1999 – Reusing IT is working with a charity in Kenya which is establishing schools to provide free education for children living in Kibera, the country’s largest slum.
Sister Mary Colleen, photographed, took us around parts of Kibera before we commenced work with her charity, to give us a sense of the day to day challenges faced by the people she is supporting. Sister Mary, a catholic teacher, is the driving force behind setting up the schools to give children here the opportunity to have an education.
She told us, “If you get an idea of the lives of people here and the work we do to help them, you will understand better how best you can support us.”
The project was a lesson in not trying to plan before understanding the full scope of the parameters.
Ross says, “I was grappling with questions such as, ‘Where do we plug the computers in?’, and wondering if I was going to get involved in building and plumbing.” But Sister Mary had all that covered.
Once the computers were installed, one of the biggest challenges was how to share information between organisations in different locations working with the charity – for example, sending health information on children at school to their primary health care workers. The solution was to use floppy drives: copying data onto drives and employing a man with a bicycle to collect them and take them to the other locations. “It worked beautifully,” says Ross.
“It resulted in one of the most successful IT projects I have even been involved in. We eventually set up computers in over 200 separate locations throughout Nairobi, with two or three computers at each location, and helped coordinate a massive humanitarian support effort for the people living in the slums.”