Background

​Mbando is an off-the-grid rural village in Malawi - with no electricity, no Internet, and limited mobile coverage. The people suffer from a lack of educational learning resources, that have kept them in poverty. Abundance is helping to address this by building a solar-powered eLearning center using RACHEL and KEEPODS providing offline versions of the world's best free educational websites, which are updated with the latest content regularly.
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The unemployed youth at Mbando Village have no access to the internet. Thereby stifling their bright ideas for small businesses due to lack of learning resources. Teachers at the village need teaching resources too, all of which could be easily obtained online. We need to overcome the obstacles of lack of electricity, no wifi and scanty mobile coverage, before we can set up an eLearning center at this village.

Solution

Abundance has tied up with Shift IT, a non-profit IT company to help the community at Mbando village to start an E-Learning Center. This center will be set up despite the fact that the area does not have electricity, wifi connection and has scanty mobile coverage. Shift IT provided advice on how this is possible. To overcome the access to electricity challenge, solar panels will be used for powering the center. The internet experience will be provided to this rural offline, offgrid society through an offline technology called "Rachel" (https://store.worldpossible.org/) which has educational content in its module repository which youth can access to enhance learning and entrepreneurship skills. Each E-Learning Center user will have his/her own device to connect to this learning hub. This low-cost computing solution will be in the form of Keepod flash drives (http://www.keepod.com/) and refurbished old laptops. Keepods only cost $35 per person and old laptops are expected to cost around $140. The center will be hosted in Mchilima primary school, which will be a contribution that is sustainable for the community and help teachers in the school as well as students.

​Long-Term Impact

Abundance hopes that the E-Learning Center will support 45 people to start with and then expand to 200 people in and around Mbando village. Teachers at Mchilima school could access learning materials and unemployed youth could improve their skills and knowledge which may inspire them to start small businesses. The youth had approached Abundance asking for trainings in simple technologies such as soap making. Once the E-Learning Center is set up, this information will be at their fingertips. That is true empowerment! The possibilities for enhancing human wellbeing through the E-Learning Center is enormous. Abundance hopes to document stories of how the E-Learning Center improved lives and this will be posted on Abundance’s website, inspiring more support for such rural communities.

We undertook crowdfunding for this eLearning Center and got over 80 donations from all over the world. Thank you Donors! We have so far received over $7,000 and aim to reach our target of $10,000 to run this eLearning center in a sustainable manner.
Check out our fundraiser at Global Giving
https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/rural-offgrid-it-center-for-malawian-youth/
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Our project was featured on Chanco TV's "Malawi on the Rise" documentary View it here

​​Our fundraiser was successful and we received the following awards from Global Giving.