Nakaseke community Library was established in 1997 under the pilot of
Nakaseke Multipurpose Community Telecentre project which was executed by
Uganda National Commission for UNESCO and the National Library of
Uganda for a period of three years. It is now stands out to be the only
biggest public Community Library in Nakaseke District.
The Library
has a total of 8650 reading materials and it is the most accessed
service in the Centre by mainly; school going children, teachers, health
workers, extension staff and researchers and perhaps some few
semi-illiterate farmers. This is because the biggest collection is in
English. And it has been difficult to find enough local content produced
in the native languages that can impart skills to the local community.
The
Centre also provides electronic information on agriculture, health and
education which is accessed on the Internet at affordable cost. Computer
training is also another service which is offered to the community. In
addition, the Library introduced a Box service to help far rural
marginalized schools to have access to reading materials.
However, we
observed that a lot of information is not published in books and can be
access online. The Nakaseke Telecentre management discovered that some
civil servants had limitations of visiting the Telecentre regularly to
access desired information. We then thought that by introducing a social
media platform on Facebook we could be able to attract and communicate
with them effectively.
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| Ferdie and Guan (Nijmegan University-Netherlands) giving Teachers Computers instructions |
The reason why we introduced this service was mainly to empower rural
marginalised civil society working in Nakaseke to have an opportunity
to share information, ideas and based practices locally and on the global
world. Initially we started using emails to keep the members of the
club connected to one another and later we discovered that it was not
interactive enough as some members were not participating well. We then
decided to introduce the social media preferably facebook as the best
platform to network rural civil servants from different institutions
within Nakaseke District.
So far, 60 civil servants have been trained
in basic computer application and the use of Internet. Before we
introduced the social media platform to the civil society in Nakaseke it
was pretty hard to bring all of them together. Now they can freely
communicate to each other. 90% of the ICT user club members are employed
by the government and 10% are privately employed.
This service was started in 2010 by training Civil society in emails
and computer basic applications to lay a good foundation in the use of
ICTs to the marginalized rural civil servants mainly Teachers, Nurses
and Doctors, Tutor in Nakaseke Core PTC, and Extension workers. To
achieve our goal we initiated a partnership with the University of
Nijmegen in The Netherlands whereby each year two students (interns) are
sent to assist Nakaseke Telecentre and Library in promoting the use of
ICTs.
The Training led the creation of The Nakaseke ICT user Club which has
brought unity and information sharing among civil servants unlike
before when club members were still relying on emails as the only source
of communication to one another. Each year we train only 20 people so
far we have a total of 60 civil servants of whom 42 are male and 18
female respectively.
Robert Kinyenya,30 years the headteacher of
Bukalabi Primary School he says that after school 8years ago “I lost
contact with all my friends and working in rural areas it was very
difficult to interact with them. Life was also very difficult, even
interacting with my fellow teacher within the district was not easy”.
But when Nakaseke Telecentre invited us for a training life changed when
I was introduced to facebook. I was so amazed to find my old friend and
new friends. Am happy to be the chairperson of Nakaseke ICT User Club..
Rose Najemba is a nurse in Nakaseke Hospital and she has some
interesting story to share, “working with patients all the time used to
make me tired” but when I was invited for ICT training at first I did
not know how it was going to impact on my life! I was so happy to find
my boss and other old friends.”
