SLS-7b5 Gashora Project

In 2016 we had another new project in Gashora, 1.5 hours south of Kigali.  This was in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania (UPenn).  Gashora Girls Academy is a top high school in Rwanda, recruiting the best girls from across the country, teaching them science and English, and sending many of them to top universities overseas.  One of the girls, in the second cohort, graduated from GGS in 2015, completed her first year at University of Pennsylvania, and is back with the Penn team in 2016.  One of the UPenn projects this year is to improve the computer network at GGS.  We have a small team sent to Gashora to work with the UPenn team on this project. 

Nearby is a primary school endowed with 100+ OLPCs (One Laptop Per Child).  They hardly seemed used at all. This seems quite common in a lot of the places we went.  Well-meaning people donate valuable equipment to a community in need; the community does not have the expertise or infrastructure in place to take advantage of the valuable equipment; the equipment sits in a corner hardly being used; in the mean time the equipment gradually deteriorates and becomes obsolete.  It is a sad story which seems to be repeating again and again.   

Our team installed a file server with lots of e-learning material, connected to a wireless router linked to the Internet with a SIM card.  It gives the school the option to connect to the Internet for a fee, or to operate it as a self-contained Internet-in-a-box without actually connecting to the “Internet”.  The students can now make use of the OLPCs to access the learning material on the file server in their own local area network.  We provided basic training to the teachers on operating the network and the computers.  This was the best we could do at the moment - since we did not have a lot of time and prior knowledge of the situation at the school.  We also could not stay at the school for too long, having our own core projects back in Gikomero to take care off. 

We were so impressed with the students at Gashora Girls Academy that we immediately recommended to PolyU to start recruiting from the students from Gashora to study at PolyU.  We gave an impromptu pitch to the girls there about studying at PolyU before we left.  It was just the beginning and much still had to be done.  We need to provide entry scholarships to the students with outstanding academic performance, otherwise few, if any, would be able to afford attending PolyU.  PolyU had to send representatives from the International Affairs Office as well as the Dean of Engineering to Rwanda for promotion and recruitment.  We also had to spend a couple of years working through the procedures and developing proper ways to assess the applicants’ credentials.  Finally, in 2019, PolyU successfully admitted 2 students from Rwanda, a historic first. In 2020, another 2 were admitted. All were provided with generous entry scholarships.  

This is one of the lessons we learned - that it pays to invest the time and effort to know a country. The dividends can be more and better service-learning but it can also be something else unexpected.  The Gashora connection was something that we did not anticipate in the beginning.  If we had not come to Rwanda for service-learning and kept looking for new opportunities for projects and collaboration, we would not have discovered Gashora and PolyU might not have consider recruiting students from Rwanda.  They are few in number at this point, yet have already added an exotic new dimension to student life at PolyU.