BOSCO-Uganda is a local, grass roots, organization working to implement collaborative ICT solutions in the rural, post-conflict, communities of northern Uganda. We deploy our network of solar-powered PCs connected to long-range WiFi Internet and VoIP telephony services in former IDP camps, schools, health clinics, local government offices, and rural CBO/NGO offices.
BOSCO currently organizes community ICT training sessions centered on a Train the Trainer (ToT) model. Our philosophy is to begin teaching people collaborative, Web 2.0 ICT skills that will be immediately useful to their line of work. We begin with email, move to blogging, and then encourage users to use our Wikispaces forum and our Intranet forums to post relevant, local, content centered on their needs. We are seeing schools and farmers post small scale funding proposals in these spaces while others are documenting their surroundings and the post-war resettlment process through digital ethnography.
We also connect local institutions to our network (e.g. health clinics, local government offices, rural CBO/NGO outposts) to better facilitate them in their work and help them to collaborate with their stakeholders. We are about to double our presence in northern Uganda over the next two years in a newly established partnership with Unicef.
More information can be found at www.bosco-uganda.org or at www.bosco-uganda.wikispaces.net where you will find user-generated content arising from each site.
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