Sharing Awareness has signed MOU with Indus Relief and Development Organization, Pakistan. Both organizations agreed to work on education, water, sanitation and hygiene, capacity building and children rights. The pilot project will take place in a remote area of Layyah district, southern-Punjab Pakistan. The Indus will conduct a study on local needs concerning the development areas mentioned above in three villages of Union councils Shahpur and Shadu Khan. Together with Indus, sharing awareness will suggest and implement the solutions according to local needs. Sharing Awareness will also help Indus in capacity building and training of staff regarding the innovative use of Information and Communication Technologies and social media.

Read more about INDUS 

The lack of clean water is a huge obstacle of development in many areas in the world. It makes the reality even worse, as almost 25% of non-salty water resources in the world has been spoilt and is dangerous for human health.

Hand washing is by far the best way to prevent germs from spreading and keep everybody from getting sick.

Sharing Awareness has developed two webb app and a mobile friendly sites on hand washing and cleaning water to prevent sickness.

Clean water webb app
Clean hands

Students of Faisal public school had came up with an entrepreneurial idea by looking at the community demand of having hand fans. Their city Multan is located in southern Punjab region which is the warmest place in the country, where temperature could rise till 50c. Due to the continuous shortfall of electricity during the summer time in this area, people were in need of having hand fans when their is no electricity. Students collected the recycled materials from their homes and school canteen and started creating hand fans for the local community. Children found it very exciting, easy and sustainable experience. They earned handsome amount of money by selling these fans and also believed that they are contributing to the environment positively.

Faisal Public school is Sharing Awareness partner in Pakistan.

Sharing Awareness member was in the jury for most innovative ICT use in school competition during the RICTE conference

Members from Sharing Awareness recently visited Rwanda to follow up on our work and participate in the The Rwanda International Conference on Technology in Education (RICTE)

Days before the conference

We had already planned a meeting together with our partner MKFC Stockholm Folkhögskola together with a local Art School to discuss possible cooperation, we have written about this separately here (Swedish link). It was a great school, the garden was the classroom for a bunch of twelve year old children. It was strangely quiet in the “classroom”, not a raised voice, whether adult or child. The children learned to paint and sculpt.

Another meeting we had planned in advance was the Rwanda Education Board for a meeting with the Education Minister’s ICT group. Topic: Open University Project and e-learning. We discussed ways of possible cooperation in ICT. A concrete proposal is to send the evaluation of the program MKFC and Kigali Institute of Education conducted in Rwanda to see the possibilities to integrate the programs together with Sharing Awareness. The details worked out by mail right now how this will develop.

We also met Educat, a Danish NGO. Their goal is to teach people who want to start a business how to proceed in order to get insight into the creation of a business, by building a business plan. They are interested in a possible partnership.

The conference

The conference started on Wednesday as the country’s Minister of Education inaugurated, more information is available here and the hashtag # RICTE12 on Twitter.

We organized a workshop on ICT and entrepreneurship, we showed practical examples from our own operations and subsequent lively discussions and practical work for the participants. One of the workshop participants spoke about their deal for young people and the media. The room was well-stocked with participants who asked questions including how ICT has been used by us.

Results
We learned a lot about ICT development in Rwanda is very important for our understanding to operate e-learning in this country. By hearing about others’ experiences on ICT-supported education, we also had the opportunity to critically reflect on our own method of working with e-learning.

We recognised many of the problems with IT development in Sweden in the late 90′s when conference participants talk about their projects. The big difference is that there are a lot of inspiration for how successful and unsuccessful projects can be run and what investments can be made. Our view is that we contributed this knowledge during the conference to network, talk about our projects and participate in the various groups at the conference and beyond.

Outside the conference, we see good opportunities to continue to work with both the Art School, educat, Rwanda Education Board and the Kigali Institute of Education.

Mrs Beatrice.

Mrs Happiness to the left and Lilian Chibiko from Sharing Awareness to the right

The pictures above shows some recipient of the little effort from Sharing Awareness. These women are Mrs Beatrice and Mrs Happiness. The money was meant to support their small scale business.

The empowerment was greeted with joy and report reaching us shows that they are praying for God’s blessing on our School.
However, there is need to empower more people in this community especially women and youths. Some of them are taking to crimes due to poverty, lack of education and no meaningful venture where they can engage themselves.

Ugwaku is a community in Okigwe Local Government Area of Imo State, Nigeria with inhabitants of about 12,000 people. The majority of the people in this community are farmers and it is mostly women who are involved in subsistence farming. Women and Children are the major populated group in the community. Statistically, majority are still struggling to have basic necessities of life thus it became important that some empowerment program should be created to support the suffering women in this community.

Finally, may we thank you for your kind generosity to the good people of Ugwaku community.

The main purpose of our visit to Niliyungdo was to start a Solar Project in the village.
The objective was to:

• Install Solar panels. (The panels and modules are capable of lighting 5 lights for at least 3 hours a day. It is also capable of charging 5-10 mobiles at a time.)
• Teach the local change agents on the proper care and maintenance of the panels and module.
• Start a Microfinance program with the charging of mobile phones for the village and nearby villages. With 5 selected local agents as supervisors of the program, where the income will be directed towards the development of the community.
• Update the progress of the village since our last visit.

Read more about the recent activities in Niliyungdo and the future plans in the three reports

• solar installation in niliyungdo
• Education Report on_ Niliyungdo
• Health in Niliyungdo 2012

The teachers of Faisal public school has been taking teacher training course with MKFC Stockholm College through distance with elearning and have been trained how to use learning management system, social media tools and ICT tools for pedagogies. During the course teachers of Faisal Public School have been implementing problem based learning approach and involving children in different activites concerning health, traffic safety, children rights, environment, nutrition, dramma and play, use of ICT in learning, and entrepreneurship.

This new library initiative will encourage children to enhance their reading skills and also motivate them to be friends with reading. The students together with teachers will develop digital contents in their local language on different subjects. These contents will be available on the Internet later and it would be possible to use these contents for free.

The school administration has been using mobile phones and sms technology to involve children in the learning during summer holidays and believes that it also helped them to connect parents and local community in the learning process.

Picture courtesy: Smartsoft

“I want to appreciate all your concern at this point Nigeria is in sorrow. I am safe and my people as well. It has not been easy but God is seeing me through. I have seminar for the women next week with the micro-finance bank and the youth this saturday”.

 Årsredovisning 2011

By using progressive methods and ideas, focusing on e-learning in authentic school environments, the teacher training programmes we support are high quality, cost-effective, and extremely flexible. And by basing all our work on local needs and wishes, we can ensure that the exchange of knowledge in any teacher training programme is mutual – it’s all about sharing awareness.