By Michael Kevane | FAVL Director, West Africa
Greetings, supporters of FAVL's activities in Burkina Faso! Our girls' computer literacy and leadership program, hosted at FAVL's Houndé Multimedia Center, remains open and active. We have received $2905 (slightly over half our project goal of $5500) from generous supporters like you.
We were fortunate this summer to have an undergraduate from U.C. Berkeley (Matthew) volunteer in Burkina Faso to help with our Hounde multimedia center. Matthew trained one of our new FAVL staff members, Fankani, in using the computers to create books, using Microsoft Publisher.
Matthew also worked with Fankani to organize three smartphone training sessions for young people in Koumbia village. The sessions were held in the Koumbia library, using six smartphones that the library owns. The sessions were mixed gender, including six young men and six young women. The youth learned how to use a browser to do Internet research, how to set-up and manage a Facebook account, and how to communicate with others through texting. The goal was to develop some information literacy skills.
Since Matthew was a volunteer, the costs of the sessions were minimal (transport, pens and paper for participants, snacks, and mobile phone credits for connecting to the Internet), and we have allocated $100 from the project fund for these sessions. We had earlier allocted $250 for the first workshop held in August 2015. We thus have sufficient funds in the project budget to organize a more intensive workshop and purchase a couple of computers, but we are still in the process of recruiting a manager for the Hounde Multimedia Center (no candidate so far has had the needed computer skills). As soon as we hire a manager, we will organize some workshop sessions and purchase the computers.
We thank you for helping bring information literacy to remote rural villages in Burkina Faso, and would greatly appreciate your continued financial support. Our ongoing literacy-building activities continue in Tuy province and updates are regularly posted on the FAVL blog.
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