Nurturing Mutomo ICT Gurus

By Rhoda Musili & Arnold Mukala

When word got out in January 2012 that Mutomo Maarifa Centre was to offer free ICT training, it was a great relief to many residents who were yearning to invest in IT skills training in Mutomo and other neighboring towns. In less than one week, over 80 community members had flocked the Centre to register for this rare opportunity. Not many could believe that such training could be offered free of charge and majority wanted to confirm if the good news was indeed true!

The free community training is part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded to ALIN in August 2011 to implement various community activities. The main goal of the community IT training is to enable communities’ access opportunities and resources available globally and to catalyse youth entrepreneurship for livelihoods improvement.

Reaching the Mutomo Community

In a bid to reach all the community members the Field Officer used the Maarifa centre Advisory Committee members, public Barazas, notice boards at strategic places like District Commissioner’s compound and even churches to pass the word across. A form was designed to register those interested and captured the following trainee details like name, age, level of education, occupation, preferred time for training and how the trainees planned to utilize the skills gained and how they heard about the opportunity. Within a period of one month, over 100 trainees had registered for the basic IT training. The training packages include: Introduction to computers, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Internet.

Composition of the Trainees

After registration, Mr Phillip Kyule analyzed the registration form and came up with very interesting results as follows: a whopping 80 % of the interested community members heard about the opportunity from the Advisory Committee members, 19 % got the information from friends and neighbors while 1 % got it from the Maarifa Centre’s Face book account.

Youth registered the highest number of trainees with 76% while adults came second with 31 % followed by children with 3 % beneficiaries......Read more