Contact: Matt Stockdale (Project Director) <matt@linkethiopia.org>
Cc: Chris Grant <chris@linkethiopia.org>, James Love <james@linkethiopia.org>
Link Ethiopia
+44 (0)7747 696 998
www.linkethiopia.org
Good to hear from you and about your involvement in the OLPC project. We'd certainly be interested to see if we can work together on this. The schools we work with in Ethiopia are crying out for computers so this couldn't be better timed.
We have two offices in Ethiopia - the main office in Gondar, in the north of the country, where we have two Ethiopian members of staff working full-time. The other office is in Debre Zeit, just south of Addis Ababa, which has only just recently been established and has one Ethiopian member of staff. The 40 schools we work with are clustered in these areas and range from pre-school nurseries through to high schools, but it sounds like the OLPC project is aimed at elementary level pupils which sounds fine.
My only concern at this stage is how schools and communities would deal with the potential of jealousy and or theft if 100 pupils (roughly two classes) have laptops, and hundreds of other pupils at the same school don't. But perhaps that's something that other OLPC projects have advice about!?