In 2021, Chrysalis set up a school in a remote rural area of Omoro district in Uganda. This was by design because we believe strongly that the brightest children can live in rural areas, just as much as urban areas and that they deserved an equal chance to achieve their potential. Despite being a new school we currently have approximately 200 children, each of which have talents in a broad range of areas, from sport to music, leadership to art, practical skills to academics.
We feel strongly that every topic needs a cross-cutting link to ICT, so that our students are all involved in ICT in some way and thus this year, we have designed a science block with a double computer lab, with space for 120 students at a time.
The drawings for the buildings are still underway, but we could see a building something like this:
Chrysalis Uganda is an NGO in Uganda that has been running since 2010, supporting rural and inner-city young people to become social entrepreneurs and we have had some substantial success, with a number of students already running their own social businesses or NGOs. It is supported through the Chrysalis Youth Empowerment Network, a UK charity, that has been in place since 2012.
The basis of the project we are writing at the moment is about expanding the use of ICT in our school. Currently, we have around 7 laptops at the school, which are used for the following purposes:
1. For students to have supervised sessions during the week, so that they can develop their typing skills, but also explore aspects of internet, which they enjoy.
2. For certain students to have lessons in programming (currently Python), where they are being shown how to develop simple programmes.
3. For certain students to learn graphic design
However, we want to expand the learning much more into the classroom, to enhance the lessons we are teaching. Chrysalis Secondary has solar power, so we can extend the number of laptops we have significantly from the numbers we have now. Despite our rural location, we also have excellent unlimited internet from Airtel, which can be further enhanced for more computers.
In addition to this, Chrysalis runs a multitude of clubs at the school - Star Trek, Debating, Crafts, Comedy, Car mechanics, Languages, Sports, Recycling, Scripture Union, Choir, Boardgaming and chess, Social Enterprise and many more. We want to enable all of these clubs to be using the laptops outside of the class learning, so that these clubs can establish themselves on the internet, enabling people around the world to understand how talented rural African children are. For example, recently we posted this picture from the Star Trek Club and it attracted 18,000 likes on Facebook and 2,200 chares.
Rural children often feel that they are ignored by the rest of the world and connecting them to friends around the world both helps them realise they are part of a connected global community, but also helps people, who do not know the capabilities of Ugandan youth, to discover the enormous well of talent here. For instance, the girl on the left here designed and made the Star Trek uniforms herself, using the equipment we have at the school.
Many girls feel that computing is not for them and, when computers are few, they lack the confidence to demand their own time. Some even say they don't want to learn, but by integrating the computing into every element of the Chrysalis School, we can ensure that every child gains a proficiency with computers that will last them a lifetime.
For now we are just looking for 13 new computers. In Uganda, we can buy these at around £200 each and the quality of these is pretty good. So that means at a minimum we need £2600 from this fundraiser to achieve our first goal, which will achieve a great deal for us.
If we achieve this, we will be working on a plan to build the above science block, equip it and ensure we have the power for it. Funding to build the science block has been sourced.
So, if you help us with the 13 computers, then it will be the first step in a much larger plan, for which we will source further funding later, once all of the specifications are drawn up.
3 to 1 machine training in Python programming