In 2013, the Kenyan government promised to offer laptops to all students entering primary school. This was made as a promise during the election campaign, and was one of the most expensive political promises ever made. This would involve issuing laptops to each new batch of students entering first grade each year.
The aim of the project was to promote digital literacy and prepare young apprentices to thrive in an ICT-based economy.
Unfortunately the Kenyan government began to deliver on the promise only in 2016. However, it was no longer yielded laptops but rather tablets. Reality slowly sank, as there was no way the government could issue dedicated laptops to teach a child, preferring instead to use tablets specially developed for children.
Six years after the announcement of the project and three years after the start of implementation, the project was withdrawn in silence. In fact, there was no official announcement about it. Only keen budget analysts found that the government had allocated zero shillings to the project, signaling its end.
What went wrong?
Many things underlie this error because, as we shall see, technology for technology's sake is not a good idea, and digital inclusion cannot be achieved by ignoring other basic needs of a people.
This project was forced to fail for the following reasons:
- It would be extremely expensive to run the project. This would in fact cost more than all the other costs associated with free primary education currently offered by the Kenyan government;
- The lack of qualified personnel to run the program was a major obstacle. Most teachers have no computer skills, and a week-long training by the government would not make them experts, when children who should be teaching could easily overcome them using smartphones and tablets. The content was not ready either and delayed release for a long time;
- The priorities were wrong from the start. Schools do not have teachers, classrooms, an Internet connection and, in some places, there are no schools! It is also common for children to drop out of school due to a lack of books or even food;
- Lack of necessary infrastructure. Only 10% of schools were connected to the Internet, while 50% were far from the national network. Schools also lacked facilities to store devices securely, considering the many cases of school invasion in which books were being stolen.
- Lack of support mechanism when the technology failed. This left teachers and students stranded, and often had to wait a long time to receive technical support;
This is a clear idea of how many governments in African countries have been wrong when it comes to digital inclusion, as we still have many basic problems to solve, the idea is not to give the impression that nothing should be done, but some must be resolved before we can take a satisfactory step.
