Thursday, June 20, 2013

Digital Moment For Laptop Suppliers

Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - 00:00 -- BY OKECH KENDO
Digital cynics have been proved wrong. Until it surfaced last week as a budget item, the idea of laptops for class one children sounded like a misplaced priority during an age that should address more pressing needs of the education system.
But here we are with Sh53 billion being allocated for the laptop project when the shortage of teachers in primary and secondary schools is ballooning. Beyond other unmet needs, there is also the pending promotions of thousands of teachers who have been stuck in one grade for decades, with poor pay.
It is not surprising that teachers are yet to buy into the laptop idea, which they are expected to implement to facilitate e-teaching and e-learning in analogue schools.
So when the Kenya National Union of Teachers threaten to call a nationwide strike to protest a "a deliberate and mischievous attempt to undermine teachers and destroy the profession", they are questioning the viability of this discriminative Jubilee project.
When the Moi regime launched the populist milk-for-schools project in 1979, all pupils grinned like the cat that had the cream on supply days. Dairy farmers also gained from the programme that collapsed sooner than expected under the usual official procurement and distribution leakages.
The shortage of teachers in many public schools, estimated at more than 40,000, is not due to lack of trained staff, but the will to hire and pay living wages to these professionals who nurture our children. We claim to love the child in class one, but do not seem to care about their siblings who graduated with degrees in education in 2007. These graduates are yet to join the Teachers Service Commission more than six years after they were empowered to read and earn a living through their sweat.
The government says it has no money to bridge the personnel shortages in the institutions of the future. Yet it is into these dilapidated schools that the government wants to pump high-tech toys for kids. Having done that for kids in first grade, what will the government do for the rest to spread e-learning without e-teachers?
Most of these schools do not have the right personnel in the recommended ratio of one teacher to 26 pupils to facilitate effective analogue learning. Some of these schools, especially those in rural areas and urban slums, do not have facilities that make any form of learning possible.
Consider a laptop-nursing but hungry child who is expected to learn under a tree in Mandera! The laptop may be solar-powered, but the child is empty in the stomach, with dry tears splattered over the face. The inconsistency sounds like putting new wine in old wineskins!
The Jubilee think tank may consider laptops key to a techno-savvy future, but cynics see a huge opportunity for politically correct suppliers and Chinese assemblers to exploit the usually frail public procurement system. Here is possibly the making of another cash minting opportunity that could be more lucrative than the supply of VW Passats in the early years of President Kibaki's second term.
If technology is the missing link in national development, then it is urgently needed in agricultural production to address food security. Over the last three weeks, the skies have been overcast, but it has not rained in some counties to the west of Nairobi. When the rainy season began in late March, it was flooding every day, with deaths every quite often. Now the supply of rains has been cut when crops begin to flower. Floods and drought wreck havoc in equal measure, as we toy with laptops for hungry babies.
The anxiety over the irregularity of the disrupted long rainy season is growing at a time food crops should be maturing. These are signs of the coming famine unless it rains tonight.
Peasants are disillusioned, as crops turn yellow and wither. Weaverbirds are increasingly getting frustrated. Their subdued chirping show the birds know something is not right at a time they should be preparing to reap, as usual, where they did not sow.
But our children, who are yet to muster numeracy and literacy skills, are going to acquire new toys, courtesy of taxpayers during an age that suffers huge budget deficits, falling tax revenues, high public expenditure, unconscionable unemployment rates, mass poverty, and high insecurity across the country, including in Nairobi where the Inspector-General of Police lives.
Someone up the jubilant Jubilee rank should have the audacity to look at society from the position of the masses who do not know the source of their next meal. Thinking about basic needs has never been so urgent.
- See more at: http://the-star.co.ke/news/article-124886/digital-moment-laptop-suppliers#sthash.nppeD2Bh.dpuf

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