School benefits from computer donation

THE principal of Samson Shiviti Primary School said he could not believe it when he was notified that the school had won in the Vodacom Millionaires competition for schools.

The school received 20 laptops for learners and one laptop for a teacher.

“When I was called and told the school had won, I requested a confirmation letter to show that we had indeed won, but even then, it was still like a dream to me.

“It was only when the Vodacom workers came here to install the internet infrastructure that the dream became a reality,” said principal, Edward Baloyi.

Baloyi said the donation, which came from a win in a Vodacom competition where underdeveloped schools applied for donations of high-tech infrastructure from Vodacom Millionaires, would make teaching easier in the school.

“What was normally done manually, would now be done easily on computers,” he said.

As part of the donation, the school also received an interactive white board, projector, a server, printer, and cartridges.

It will also receive 700 mega bites of free data every month in order to access the internet for a period of two years.

The chairperson of the School Governing Body, Shadrack Mbombi, said the newly installed infrastructure in the school would, “help to produce web designers, IT technicians, and scientists in the next 10 to 15 years”.

“As parents, our only concern now is security. We would like to appeal to the chief and the community to work together to secure this infrastructure for our children,” he said.

Vodacom’s head for sustainability and corporate citizenship, Suraya Hamdulay, said: “Through this project, Vodacom Millionaires is confident that the introduction of information and communication technology will help to motivate the learners at schools to improve their results”.

“The project is also in line with Vodacom’s on-going drive to help provide Internet connectivity to communities that do not have access to internet services.

“We started with this project eight years ago and today we’ve donated almost 300 computer libraries around the country,” she said.

Apart from this, Vodacom is said to have begun a process of retrofitting schools that previously benefitted from donated computer libraries to ensure they have the most up-to-date hardware and software.