Pupils Improve Academic Performance Through Internet

Pupils in the Kwabre West and Tano South Districts are taking advantage of internet accessibility to improve on their academic performance.

The two, located in the Ashanti and Brong Ahafo regions respectively, are beneficiaries of the Community Information Center (CIC) Initiative provided for by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Four CICs were constructed in each District in 2008 to provide internet connectivity in the districts.

The facility was also constructed among other things to provide schools in beneficiary communities and hardware support for the teaching and learning of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) as part of the basic school curriculum and to generally open up the Districts for Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs).

This came to light when a monitoring and evaluation team from the UNDP country office paid a working visit to some of the beneficiary communities.

In Kodie, the district capital of the newly created Afigya Kwabre District, where one of the CICs is situated, pupils of the Kodie Methodist Basic School were seen busily learning with the facility.

According to teachers of the school, the facility serves as a point where pupils could learn the practical aspect of the theories they learnt about ICT.

Thirteen-year-old Godfred Adu-Gyamfi, a class 6 pupil of the school, told the Daily Graphic that the use of the CIC constantly updated their knowledge of ICT and how to access the internet.

“The CICs have helped us a lot. When we started studying ICT in our school, we were only learning about computers in books. Some of us had not even seen a computer before and did not know how to operate it. Since we started using the facility, we are now able to operate the computers even on our own. We learn with most of the softwares that are on it like Microsoft Word, Excel and Mavis Beacon among others. I think that if our CIC is supported, the pupils here would benefit from it for a long time” he said.

In the Afigya Kwabre District, the CICs are situated in Nkwantakese, Amoako, Kodie and Hemang.

The District Chief Executive for the area, Mr Kakyire Oppong Kyekyeku said the availability of the CICs had bridged the digital divide that existed in some rural parts of the district and its urban parts.

According to him, the four CICs were spread across the four area councils that made up the district. This, according to him, had made information flow from the district capital to other parts of it relatively easy.

He said data entry clerks of the ongoing biometric voter registration exercise were trained by officials at the CIC through the use of the computers there. This had reduced the cost that the Electoral Commission would have incurred if it had outsourced the training process to a private entity.

In the Tano South District Assembly, four major schools in the district capital of Bechem depended on the CIC for their practical ICT lessons. Students of the St Joseph College of Education, Presbyterian Senior High School, Bechem Girls Model School and the Bechem Business College all accessed ICT education from the center.

The District Chief Executive (DCE) for the area, Bukari Zakari Anaba said the assembly had, in partnership with the Ghana Education Service (GES) in the District, drawn up time tables to accommodate each of the beneficiary schools in the center.

According to him, the internet facility provided by the CIC had also facilitated information dissemination on the activities of the assembly to its grass root members.

The assembly had created a website on which all activities of the assemblies are posted for members of the community to access.

“Administrators of our website also post advertisements of some of the indigenous businesses on the website so people are able to contact them and do business with them directly” he said.

There is a second CIC at Techimantia, another community in the district, also through a partnership initiative of the UNDP.