Why i joined the OLPCorps

It was my NYSC (National Youth Service Corps) year and I was lucky to be sent to a private firm (Ateq.ICT) for my internship for a period of a year. Alteq.ICT happens to be a consultancy and project based firm. One of the projects they where handling back then was the pilot phase of the One Laptop per Child Initiative at the L.E.A Primary School, Galadima, Gwarimpa, Abuja. I was attached to the team as Technical Support, my job was to fix all broken XO’s, update software build, send broken XO’s to Quanta (XO manufacturer) as well as make sure the school had Internet connectivity at all time.


The team was made up of Tomi Davies (Alteq.ICT’s Chief Operations Officer) who guided the team during the whole deployment period, Carla Gomez of the OLPC for the learning content (constructionist learning), Roland Igwe was to assist her with this, Ahmad Dan-Hamidu and I were in charge of Technical Support and Asabe Yabani later joined the learning team. Towards the end of the project, Chukwuka Uzoegwu and Hassan Ogunlowo (my team member) later on joined the team to aid with technical support of the project. At first it was business as usual but as days passed by, I became interested in the XO and activities embedded in it thanks to my interaction with Carla.


I took it upon myself to learn about constructivism and interacted with the kids to find out how they faired when they worked on the XO’s, I realized the impact the laptops had on them was immense as some of the kids who couldn’t write their names knew how to a few weeks after the XO’s were introduced. Some of the kids even helped me out in fixing broken XO’s (Kabiru of primary 6 and Shuaibu who was in primary 4). I realized these kids can be anything they want to be and achieve all they want in life with the aid of the XO thus my interest in the OLPC.


The project ended on a sad note for me as the Federal Government who had previously promised to purchase a million (1,000,000) XO’s decided not to as they felt there were other needs the kids needed instead of laptops which shouldn’t be a priority instead they will rather build more classrooms and give out more books.


I had the opportunity to interact with Julia Reynolds throughout the duration of the project as she was the contact person from Boston who handled the receipt of broken XO’s and replacements. It was during this period we became very close friends and I look forward to meeting her at Kigali.


It was Julia who told me about the OLPCorps Africa project based on my interest in the OLPC after which I decided to contact some of my buddies to put together one of the 220 proposals sent to the OLPCorps and later picked as one of the 30 finalists.


I hope to prove everyone who thought the OLPC was a waste of time wrong as well as make a case to the fellows in charge of Education in the Country and NGO’s who are willing to champion this cause.