literacy

We believe digital skills and webmaking are vital 21st century skills, the fourth pillar to reading, writing and arithmetic. But we face a serious challenge in making this a reality in the kenya and around the world: there’s a digital literacy “gap.”

Youth and digital natives increasingly know how to consume with technology, but lack the skills and knowledge they need to create with it. When it comes to the web, we’re at risk of teaching an entire generation how to read, but not how to write.

East Africa has made huge progress towards achieving Universal Primary Education UPE,but sadly around 10 million primary school pupils drop out each year ,and many children who do manage to complete school have very poor reading skills in English and in their mother tongue.this proves a huge hurdle for those children who go on to attend secondary school where all lessons are taught in English.most schools have no library ,and the books that do exist in classrooms are often out of date and are shared between 10 or more children .For most families,books are luxury they simply cannot afford ,

To me, the true power and beauty of community-based organizing lies in a small group of individuals taking on a significant social problem and solving it for the common good. The new NetSquared platform is up and going, and I am thrilled to challenge the NetSquared community to connect with one another on solving a social problem that has everything to do with furthering the common good.

I am delighted to report that NCTech4Good, a NetSquare Local Group, bought a laptop for Janet Bauer’s project “I’m A Great Child Worldwide” to use teaching children in extreme poverty in the slums of Kenya, using income from our conferences.

The term “digital divide” has been commonly used to represent the gap between those who have “access” to technology (particularly the Internet) and those who do not. Ten years ago when the Pew Internet and American Life Project started researching the digital divide as an issue of “access”, they found the differences in access were stark across locations, including at home, in schools and at work.