Safaricom to empower Kenya’s Digital Literacy Programme with free Internet

It was announced that Safaricom will offer free internet to schools that will be part of Kenya’s, Ministry of ICT Digital Literacy Programme.

This announcement was made, this morning, during a press briefing held by the Ministry of ICT whereby they updated members of the media and others who attended, the meeting, of the programme’s current status.

The programme’s current status is that the Ministry is currently working towards the implementation of the program in 150 schools country wide. The commencement of the Proof of Concept (POC) will start on 22nd February 2016.

“Safaricom will be providing free Internet for the programme. That is starting with the Proof of concept; they will be providing connectivity to the 150 participating schools and will continue to all 22, 000,”said Mr. Joe Mucheru Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of ICT, during the meeting.

CIO East Africa, last week, reported that the proof of concept phase seeks to allow the successful bidders to prove their capacity to implement the full project to all the 22,000 schools. This phase will last twelve (12) weeks and will cover 150 schools distributed across the 47 counties.

The two successful bidders were the consortium of Moi University and JP Couto, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and Positivo BGH.

“We believe in the transformative power of the Internet,” said Stephen Chege, Safaricom head of Corporate Affairs, while talking about Safaricom’s promise.

Mr. Chege said that the provision of free internet by Safaricom will help the Digital Literacy Programme go a long way as devices alone cannot do that, calling it Safaricom’s way of giving back.

This commitment by Safaricom is in line with the Ministry’s insistence that the Digital Literacy Programme is more than just about devices.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we continue to emphasis that this program is not about devices. We now want to focus on the other components of the program such as teacher training, power connections, content creation with the ultimate goal of job and wealth creation for Kenyans. We want to build a knowledge society, and this is a step towards that direction for our children and future generations,” Mr. Joe Mucheru said.