“Our lives will never be the same,” said Paul Lebepe, the principal of a rural high school in South Africa’s northern Limpopo province, whose students are benefiting from a new corporate sponsored computer centre.
While similar public/private sector partnerships aimed at bridging the digital divide have become increasingly common in South Africa, what sets this particular project apart is that schools are helped to become more self-sufficient.
This has been done through the additional donation of a public phone shop to schools benefiting from the programme — a boon in telecomms-deprived rural South Africa.
Sixty percent of the profit generated by these phone shops is ploughed back into the school and the remaining 40% used to cover the operating costs of the shop. The shops also create employment for members of the community who are appointed to manage the day to day operations.
The project has been sponsored by telecoms giant MTN.
Rudi Matjokane of the MTN Foundation, the social responsibility arm of the mobile phone network operator, said that 11 schools across the Limpopo province had benefited from the project. The schools receive about 10 computers with Microsoft donated software, a server, printer and fax. Some have already been connected to the internet and the others will soon be online.
So far three schools have been equipped with phone shops, but it is envisaged that each of the 11 schools will have one.
The project is also being rolled out to schools in the central Mpumalanga and coastal KwaZulu-Natal provinces.
Lebepe’s school, Molabosane High, is situated in the village of Rita, about 30 km outside the small town of Tzaneen. It was built mostly through his fundraising efforts. Donations from the embassies of the United States and Australia, as well as from the Anglo-American mining conglomerate, paid for the building of an administration block and several classrooms.
Molabosane’s computer centre was officially opened on 10 April and Lebepe believes the impact on learners and staff has been immense.
“We think it’s a big investment — even our teachers, some of the staff older than I, have started now to work on the computers. Our lives will never be the same! Eventually there will be no learner who leaves our school who is not computer literate,” boasted Lebepe.
When reporters visited the school, the enthusiasm of the learners was evident. A group of them were impatiently waiting outside for an earlier group’s lesson to end at 4pm, well after school hours.
One of those pupils, 13-year-old Beauty Letsoalo, said she was willing to wait late for computer lessons as she knew this would help her reach her goal of becoming either a doctor or an information technology professional.
“People want to learn computers, but there are not many,” she said. It was her second basic computer literacy lesson, which represents her first interaction with computers.
For Beauty and most of her fellow pupils, computers were something far removed from the reality of life in rural South Africa, which still bears the scars of the apartheid era’s ‘bantu education’.
“What can you say when you realise some of them have never seen a computer before? They never knew what a mouse was, they only knew that a mouse was some animal you find at home sometimes. It’s a whole new world being opened up for them,” Lebepe said.
Under apartheid, blacks were given an inferior education and job reservation meant they could never aspire to professions designated for white people only.
“In the past the government neglected our [black] schools, it is really only now that they are starting to do something, and the private sector has come in and said ‘we can make a big difference’… that goes a long way,” Lebepe said.
For the moment only grade 8 and grade 12 learners can be accommodated in the computer centre. But Lebepe hopes that a schedule can be worked out so that all 854 learners can begin basic computer literacy lessons, even if it means working weekends.
“They are young and open to learning. Already we work six days a week because of the special mathematics class on Saturdays, using the Learning Channel tapes and VCR and TV donated by MTN,” Lebepe added.
Word has spread and Lebepe has already received requests from other schools to use the facilities at Molabosane High. “Some of them [schools] do not even have electricity,” he noted.
Molabosane is due to be connected to the internet in June, something Lebepe is looking forward to “[as] I will be able to read what you have put out on the internet about our school,” he said. – Irin