Since 2009 I have been working with the Kampala Children’s Centre in Kampala, Uganda with the mission to provide resources through technology for the children at the center to have new opportunities for their futures.
The Kampala Children’s Centre (KCC) is a home for children orphaned by AIDs, the war in Northern Uganda and other causes. There are also various programs at KCC to support the children and families of the surrounding town of Wakiso. There is a primary school, Destiny Bridge Academy, which provides classes for children kindergarten age through 8th grade, and there is a secondary school currently being built to support children to their college years.
In 2011 and 2012, with the help of Cage Data and other donors, I spent a month at KCC building a computer lab for Destiny Bridge Academy, the on-site school for the children of the center and surrounding community, as a means to teach about using computers. This August, I will once again spend 2 weeks at KCC working in the computer lab, setting up Raspberry Pis to learn programming with. The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that will enable the children to explore the Linux operating system and learn how to program in languages like Scratch, Python and Ruby. Children will also be able to connect the Raspberry Pis to real-world items such as lights, switches and various sensors.
As part of an educational objective, while on-site I will work with a group of children from the school to build a weather station. By building a real-world item the children will learn about how to wire circuits to connect the sensors into the Pi, write programs to read from the sensors and, if time permits, build a web page to see information from the sensors on a web browser.
Technology is a rapidly growing field throughout Africa, but programming is a booming industry through Eastern Africa, including Kenya and Uganda. By teaching the kids of KCC and Destiny Bridge Academy about programming, we will continue to enable them to have new opportunities for futures working with companies throughout the world growing the nation of Uganda out of it’s poverty state.
All of this is not without it’s need. With a little more than a week before we depart we still need to raise $1,200 to support our technology and other initiatives. If you’d like to know more about or donate to our work in Uganda you can read more on Indiegogo.