ARAMUNA: Facilitating IT education for underprivileged schoolchildren
ReadMe.lk is an online-based IT magazine, empowering the IT industry with unbiased news and reviews acquired from primary research, with the aim of spreading IT awareness within the local community.
Commenced in the year 2011 and having gathered substantial information on the IT situation in the country, the founders soon realised a lacking in the system whereby a significant number of school children were deprived of adequate resources to learn IT. They especially noted the lacking in underprivileged children. This realisation brought about the initiation of Aramuna.
Launched this year, Aramuna serves to promote IT education among underprivileged school children, assist other voluntary outreach organisations who are working towards the same cause and be an umbrella which would support organisations towards raising IT awareness.
In an interview with the Weekend FT, Aramuna Founder Andrew Jebaraj shared the details of this project.
“Aramuna is a part of ReadMe.lk. It’s a brainchild of ReadMe.lk. ReadMe is 100% IT and mainly focuses on the corporates. We promote the Sri Lankan IT industry as a whole,” he said. “While promoting that we found this problem – kids are not ready to come into the IT industry. Many only start to learn IT when they go into universities. Many children actually go to computer classes to learn it but they could do it from their schools where there are facilities that are not utilised. We noted that for people to come into IT, we need to tap into the school children. We saw the need to build the school IT children from the ground level – that’s when we came up with Aramuna.”
ReadMe commenced in 2011 and Aramuna commenced this year but the ideas have been there for a year. “It was supposed to be started about a year back but looking at other projects, we saw that a lot of those that started had failed, one reason being there was no industry support like how to get it sustainable. After studying and researching the whole idea since last year, it was ‘properly’ launched this year.
“The inspiration for Aramuna came to give back to society. Our tagline says ‘Give back’. The main thing we saw was that when we travel out of Colombo, a lot of the kids could actually build a lot of good products like coding, etc but one thing that is preventing them is English and the other thing is they don’t have access to resources. Colombo kids have all the resources.
“If we give some of the resources to the underprivileged kid – we never know that kid could be a very good inventor one day. If that is not encouraged he could go into a different stream. He might even end up farming. The whole idea is to build the school IT so when they come out, the IT industry will be better. We are nurturing them from the school level.
“The plan is IT for the school, then the university then the industry. In university they learn IT anyway – that’s perfect. The problem is in the school level; where the kids – as soon as they’re out of ‘O’ Levels or ‘A’ Levels, don’t know MS Office – they’re stuck. They have to come to university to learn it whereas students in Colombo who have the privilege already know it. So there’s an imbalance there. When they come to university they struggle. When they have to use Word documents, etc there’s a mismatch. That is also why we are trying to go for school level.”
Obtaining computers – the ‘green’ way
He then explained the steps they took to accomplish their mission. The first thing they needed to start the task was the obvious – computers! They thereby formulated ways to obtain computers: “We have a partnership with ThinkGreen – a recycle company. Private and government organisations give computers to ThinkGreen, who give the usable ones to Aramuna on a loan where we give back to them once the life span of the specific hardware is over. Each computer has a lifetime of around seven years. They give it to us like a loan, say seven years. Once the lifetime is over, we give it back to them to be recycled. So it works both ways – they bring the working computers to us and we give them the non-working computers to be recycled – it’s a kind of exchange. Otherwise the working computers will just be recycled – here someone else could use it,” he said.
“We’ve also built a relationship with all the IT companies. We get the computers directly from them and we refurbish them – whatever parts could be removed, we remove; whatever could be repaired – we repair and the totally unusable ones we send to ThinkGreen. We don’t send them to the old ‘yakada’ vans where they go to the ground. So it’s properly recycled, therefore it’s a ‘green’ program also,” he added.
Volunteer base
Aramuna has built a volunteer base from the industry itself – from the universities and from the IT companies, who would support this project.
“In a nutshell Aramuna is kind of an umbrella. We get the industry, the volunteers and partners to support. It’s kind of an industry-based support for the community. The partners would get the industries to give the computers and the volunteers also from the industry. So we get the whole industry and the whole ecosystem to support the cause; because we know if we do it alone it’s very hard – it will be very time-consuming and very expensive. The only thing we can do is we get the industry to give back. The response has been very good!” he said.
Their partners are ThinkGreen, Sarvodaya Fusion, GCollege, SLASSCOM Future Careers, PR Wire, and University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC).
Andrew updated the Weekend FT a few days after the interview that their newest partner, FITIS (which is organising InfoTel), just came on-board last week to join hands with Aramuna to support the project.
IT Clubs
“In the meantime setting up the lab is not enough – we need to prepare the children; so we have come up with ‘IT clubs’. Schools have various clubs such as News Society, Rotaract and so on but they don’t have IT clubs – they don’t see the value of it. We are trying to build an IT club in each school. Whether it’s a small or big school it will have an IT club,” he said.
Basically the people who are doing the training here are the university students and the industry volunteers ‘from the IT industry itself’. “That’s the unique part,” he said. “All these volunteers are ‘IT’: they are either studying IT, doing IT or in the IT field; let’s take entrepreneurs for example – sometimes they may be with management but their original skills might be in tech. In a lot of the IT companies, the CEOs are in management but may have started off with IT – their original background is tech.”
“That’s the beauty of this Aramuna project – it’s a whole bunch of IT industry volunteers. In any organisation there are people with different talents – may be in IT, business or marketing – but this is 100% tech volunteers!”
The university students are teaching for free – all volunteers! Other volunteers are also helping.
Andrew says they don’t take conventional teachers because they only teach from the book. “We want people from the industry itself because they will tell the practical part of it. There is better exposure there. That’s why we prefer to take the industry people. They would have gone through a lot with the research, studies and lectures; we actually see a difference between the university students teaching and a normal teacher teaching. Teachers teach from the book and these guys hate books. That’s another problem – teachers always teach IT from the books and kids hate books! When we show them how to make little games on the computer, they show interest. Once we showed them how to make ‘Angry Birds’ and they loved it!” he said.
Long-term plan
The school IT clubs have gone through a pilot run and they have done around 15 schools successfully. “The long-term plan is the school IT club will maintain the school IT lab and will also meet the school IT needs. Some university students came up with brilliant solutions where registration processes were automated during student registration – simple stuff like that. The volunteers from the industry e.g. from the IT companies, etc. will do workshops for schools; customised based on their needs. Every school workshop is customised!
“They will also educate the children on how to protect themselves from social media; the university students and industry volunteers will be like a knowledge hub there. This will be a continuous club every year. That is the very basic idea,” he said.
“So on a different level we have the industry volunteers, university students, the schools and the school IT teachers. The industry volunteers will also mentor the teachers directly – because they’re from the industry, bringing the industry point of view; they see education from a different level. They will mentor the school teachers on how to teach IT.
The university students are good with kids; they will directly deal with the IT club. The industry volunteers will also mentor these university students. So the whole ground is clear.
“The industry volunteers mentor the university students and the school teachers and the university students will maintain the IT clubs. That is what we plan on the longer run,” he added.
“Now we are in the process of setting up the IT clubs, making sure the computers are working and trying to get that whole thing going.”
Nenasalas
The Nenasala (Knowledge Centre) project was implemented by ICTA to empower the village with telecentres. “We found out there were certain telecentres that were shut down. While we were doing the schools we thought it was very important to get these guys also up and running. So we partnered with Sarvodaya Fusion which is another kind of telecentre set up. It is very successful. The two were isolated – both were doing the work on their own; we merged these two.
“We took up Nenasalas that were closed down and now we are in the process of seeing how these nenasalas can sustain on their own. We are bringing the education and basic computer training. If the school IT clubs are strong and we have the nenasalas, we can empower a whole village!”
Workshops for parents
FutureCareers is an initiative of SLASSCOM. Aramuna has brought SLASSCOM FutureCareers also into this. SLASSCOM has a vision to bring in more school children by the year 2020 to bring more people into the IT industry.
“We brought that program in considering students who fail their ‘O’ Level or ‘A’ Level exams – parents keep pressurising them to redo their exams and call them useless. We brought FutureCareers in as a value addition for us to tell them there are options without even doing the ‘A’ Levels. We tell them if they failed their ‘O’ Levels then ‘just forget it; you’re just wasting your time; parents should stop pressurising your children; these are the career paths’. We brought SLASSCOM in to offer another kind of opening to the parents saying – there are ways and don’t pressurise your child.
He added, “We have done a few parents workshops where we try to stop this and they are quite convinced on this. Otherwise they think: ‘university, doctor or lawyer’. We talk to parents because it’s pointless only preparing the children if parents are not ready. We do workshops for parents where we show them success stories of people who haven’t done their ‘A’ Levels. When we talk about international figures like Richard Branson and Bill Gates they can’t relate and the moment we bring up Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, they start cursing,” he says, laughing. “So we bring in some local examples; then they understand.”
Google Developer Group of Sri Lanka
Google Developer Group of Sri Lanka (GDG-SL) or GSchools is officially endorsed by Google in Sri Lanka and a part of the global Google Developer Group community. They are also onboard to give school students basic training on Google products.
“Google Maps is built by a community called Google mapmaker – they draw the road maps – that’s how the Sri Lankan rural google maps are being made; they are willing to give that knowledge to students to map their own village. So when people use, they find errors, they report and then they correct it. That’s how the whole Google map is built.
“Eventually it comes into the school system. When teachers see that the children are using, they also want to learn. So we are indirectly trying to put in that kind of culture. After all, Google products are free,” he said.
IT and English go hand-in-hand
“Two weeks back we partnered up ‘Without Borders’ who won the Harvard Grant recently. We partnered up with them because after starting this project and after going to schools and everything, we found out another very serious problem which is English. Even in Colombo schools, they struggle wth English. IT goes with English. Say they want to migrate, they want to deal with foreign clients or work in IT companies; they need to know English. So what we thought is let’s build English also along with IT.
“We went slightly out of the way to teach English but then we thought we being a bunch of tech volunteers trying to teach English would be like – I don’t know what English that would turn out to be!” he exclaimed.
“These guys called Without Borders are volunteers from different industries who go and teach English in different places. Right now they are doing a pilot run in Avisawella. They have been doing this for the past five months. Every Sunday they travel from Colombo to Avisawella just to teach English. Four schools come together to a particular temple on Sundays for this.
“It’s a remote village – it’s isolated. We’ve partnered with them whereby they will be taking our English wing. So now we are taking English and IT together!”
Future plans
When asked what their future plans are, he said, “Let’s say we are very good and have established all the IT Clubs in all schools, then probably in the long term we will be connecting all these IT Clubs together; maybe we’ll be doing things like IT quizzes and all that in school level (it doesn’t happen now) so we will be connecting the IT Clubs where they share knowledge. Maybe there will be a mini-industry itself established there, with all these IT clubs.
“Once the IT club is built and is very strong and the Nenasalas also become very strong those two will eventually start contributing to the village or city wherever they are. Villagers can use this IT education to look up things like how to farm – they can check it out on the net and farm better; maybe even check the prices of the crops online.
“That kind of knowledge can be shared back into the village. This is how they can empower the village with IT. Once those two are really strong, we have a Nenasala supporting the village and now the IT club is also coming into that; then the knowledge spreads in the village and keeps on going there!
