The Kuyu Project: The full details

I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of it. I’m just not too sure you know much about it. That’s why I’m doing this post!

The Past

The Kuyu project began as an idea that grew out of Digital Literacy camps that I helped organize and conduct in various high schools surrounding the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton campus. I thought that by teaching kids how to use various forms of technology, we could in essence fuel their dreams and ambitions which could one day be the innovations and solutions that would change the African continent. So I blogged about it!

It didn’t take long before a couple of people responded. One Josef Scarantino (@jscarantino) of African Tech Network emailed me and offered to pick the idea (and this is how I joined the African Tech Network core team). We discussed the rationales and discovered it was quite a feasible project. So Josef, through the African Tech Network, offered to officially pick up the project and sponsor it. African Tech Network then went ahead and took care of the domain and web hosting. (And I would like to add that they are open to sponsoring African Tech projects. Just get in touch with them here).

I was pretty excited about this so I did another blog post about the progress we were making. This is the point where things got a bit tricky.

The Present

We have got to the point where we know exactly what we want to do:

To teach African high school students how to use various forms of technology so that they can use the same to make a positive impact in their communities

So we have our mission.

We also managed to get a minimalist website design done (which will be launched soon at www.thekuyuproject.org) and also set up a social media presence on Twitter (@thekuyuproject) and on Facebook as well.

We have our wiki set up (link to be announced soon).

We have our logo done (as seen above). It was done by Hal Huffman, the technical advisor to the webstartAfrica Board of Directors and passionate in his work to help African technologists achieve their goals.

We have received great ideas including using the Open ICDL content on the wiki page which was suggested by @VOA_Crystal (whose passion and drive I admire a lot!). We are still open to ideas and receiving them as they come.

The Future

Here’s the next steps I’m planning to take with this project:

• Set up a management team and an advisory board
• Forming strategic partnerships with individuals and organizations that want to collaborate on the project
• Developing crowdsourcing techniques to get content on the wiki
• Mobilizing the content (either through a game, mobile web version or voice, USSD or SMS app)
• Promoting the use of the wiki in various institutions and organizations

This is only a plan and could change based on feedback and new ideas we get.

The Reason

I REALLY believe in this:

By teaching African kids how to use various forms of technology, we are in essence fueling their dreams and ambitions which in the future have the potential to be the solutions and innovations that will change the African continent

If you share the same belief and you wish to collaborate, partner or contribute, please get in touch with me through the contacts page. Would absolutely love to hear from you.  If you have any ideas, please feel free to post them in the comments so that other may also build upon them.