Today we face a tremendous range of unmet needs related to health, education, food security and energy use. Having made considerable strides in improving access, efforts are now being made to improve the quality of education. As of the 2001 Census, there are more than 400 million school-age children that reside India. Household surveys on economic status suggest that the majority of these children’s families are not able to afford the costs of obtaining an adequate education provided by the private sector. These disparities, driven by class, caste and regional disparities are one of the greatest challenges that the country will need to address in the 21st century. This presents a serious challenge for those trying to change the status quo. The numbers are often disheartening and too large for any one individual or organization to begin to address. Our project aims to combat one of the troubling features of education inequality by providing technology access and instruction for under-served children. COVID makes what we do all the more crucial for our kids and the World ! Computer Shiksha offers computer literacy programs as a service to schools who are already successfully engaging with communities but do not have the resources to produce an effective Digital Literacy program. We provide Free Computer literacy through Self-Learning Videos in schools catering to the under-served by delivering refurbished computers, training a teacher per school, providing video based course-ware, assisting in monitoring, evaluation and certification of students and assisting in life-long maintenance and other support to these schools.

https://www.computershiksha.org/

• Ghana
• India

• Youth

Maxim Nayansa, an NGO replicated the Computer Shiksha model and we have trained 20 schools to offer Computer Shiksha in Ghana, Africa Once Computer Shiksha has helped a partner school put the IT infrastructure in place, trained the facilitators and handed over the entire content, the school is self-sufficient to run the programme with limited support from Computer Shiksha in form of Hardware repairs and O/S support, assessment and certification delivered through telephone and WhatsApp Video Thus our approach is to "enable" ! The schools continue to offer Computer Shiksha to next in line students just as they would promote a class 4 student to class 5 and so on. As such the Computer Shiksha passes the test of self sustainability. If we look at replicability, we can gladly state that here also we have good testimonials. Maxim Nyansa, an IT services NGO in Ghana studied our model; came over to India to see the model being implemented in various schools and understand how they could run the model for needy schools in Ghana. A team from Computer Shiksha went over to help train a batch of 23 schools in Ghana and also help understand how they could manage logistics for similar efforts on their own. Today, we already have 500+ kids using the Computer Shiksha model in Ghana and Maxim Nyansa has already conducted trainings on their own for the next batches of teachers. We already are working on enquiries from Nigeria and Barbados.

So computer education shifts from an employ-ability tool to an essential skill just to survive in the society. This project will thus aim to enable students to use their knowledge of computers to better their lives. The overarching desire of the Computer Shiksha ( www.computershiksha.org ) team is to leave no one computer illiterate on the face of this Earth. We have made a beginning with initially targeting kids at schools that cater to the under-served communities in India and in Ghana, Africa. As many as 1,00,228 such kids are already reaping benefits from this missionary work of Computer Shiksha.

At Computer Shiksha, we were absolutely clear that Computer education as an employ-ability tool is no more valid. There are no jobs of data entry anywhere in the world, and whatever may be still available will soon vanish due to AI. On the contrary, computer education is just as essential as Languages and Maths, because without this knowledge one just won’t be able to fit in the society, nor get any job in future, because computer education like maths need to be inherently known to perform any job.