Cue from best practices in Education

I was looking at the Earth Treasury wiki and found it wonderful project, piggybacking on OLPC's computer program in education in order to further health, economic opportunity, human rights, and anything else in the way of sustainable development. Nothing could have come to me at the appropriate time than this resource. My interest is provoked by our desire to put teachers and children in public schools in Kenya, on the path of ICT’s, more specifically, how to use ICT is improving learning outcomes.

I have in the past written about the need to revamp/overhaul the educational system in Kenya by making it address real challenges in the job market in an economy that growing with fits and hiccups in the 21st century. Whereas I believe it is time to rethink about education in Kenya, by marrying this with global trends, this is a tall order given the imminent resistance to change such a venture would elicit.. There is a great need for teachers to keep learning how to teach children and and to constantly learn how to learn. Nothing works better than enabling teachers learn from each other.

With our fingers still crossed and bated breadth we applied for the OLPC corps Educational initiative http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPCorps_UniversityofBritishColumbia_Kenya .This will provide us with a platform (if I may paraphrase the Earth treasury’s mission) to lobby the Kenyan government to buy into the OLPC Educational program.

Need we wait for the Kenyan government to act? No! We will form OLPC groups; we will also link schools around the world and teach schoolchildren how to grow into sustainable international business together. This we can as we already have a fast growing network of teachers that is keen on embracing technology to facilitate teaching and learning. We are walking the talk. We cannot wait for this change to come. We must be proactive, circumspect and vigilant in managing the process .Only then will it find a niche in our homes, in our schools and in our systems. Teachers are change agents in the society. We must be at the controls and not let the aircraft of change be on autopilot on a stormy flight! Only then, can teacher take ownership of the Millennium Development Goals and be true Millennium Development Ambassadors.

Third world countries like Kenya need an excellent antipoverty program, which by itself would have major impacts on health, economic development, and many other major global issues. Such programs should start at the school level. The quality of our society is a reflection of the status of our education system. Inasmuch as we need homegrown solutions, we have to borrow heavily form best practices world over to have meaningful change that would. It is for this reason that we have chosen Mbita for the OLPC corps initiative in collaboration with the University of British Columbia. University of British Columbia,

Mbita like many places in the littoral region as one of the highest school drop out rates, high incidences of forced /early marriages, negative parental attitude to education, the problem of children of child labour, highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy e.t.c. Darwin’s nightmare provides a picture of the socio economic realities in the lake Victoria region .