Maxwell Beganim is an Educator at the Tertiary and Secondary level. He is also a Wikipedian, a member of Open Foundation West Africa and wanted to train students on Open Knowledge. But he needed a solution to a long standing problem of connectivity in the region. How can you do Digital Literacy trainings without access to any internet resources?
Turns out there’s a portable Kiwix application for that.
And that’s why Maxwell and Otuo-Akyampong Boakye have been going around the Ashanti region, installing Kiwix-desktop in computer labs, training students on the basics. These students in turn serve as peer guides to teach others, so the program scales pretty big and pretty fast. Otuo-Akyampong also integrated Climate trainings and how to search on environmental topics.
Teachers now have offline internet access for free and can use their personal laptops and devices to access content without thinking of data cost and connectivity. Following feedback, we started working on curating local content that would be Ghana Education focused: for instance we are now scraping past Basic Education Certificate Examinations (BECE) so that students can better prepare for it.
If you want to hear more about the work these gentlemen and their colleagues do to bring Wikipedia and more Open Knowledge to Ghana, follow Open Foundation West Africa.