We currently have approximately 2m kids who have just completed their four 4 and Standard 8 exams. Looking at the expanse Kenyan curriculum, these kids were fully engaged for between 12 to 15hours daily if not more.
Drastically these kids find they have 24 hours to themselves. From extremely busy hectic school life to the lull of waiting for results or waiting for admission to secondary school or university admission.
As the English saying goes, “the idle mind is the devils’ workshop!” The communities around should look for ways to keep these kids positively engaged. Otherwise, peer pressure will take its toll and we expose 2 million kids to become an addition figure of #PeopleUsingDrugs.
Boys start off with a puff and slowly graduating into hard drugs. Along the way, they get into boda-bodas and have extra cash with which to entice. Before we realise, several girls are impregnated! The vice keeps up a vicious cycle year in year out.
It is high time that we get these young adults engaged and get them to be #productive members of society. Loosing a single youth to a vice is loosing a generation!
At Lamuka Hub, we currently have 30+ four 4 leavers, who are awaiting results to join university. These are going through intensive computing skills training that will prepare them for either facing university whilst already proficient in #ICT or enable them jump onto a career in computing. We are also hosting about 20 other students; a mix of primary and secondary kids. We pray that with this more will be guided and give vices a wide berth!
At Lamuka Hub as International Telecommunication Union setup to celebrate #girlsinict, we started the week with #coding in SCRATCH.
We assigned the students to write scripts focused on areas that particularly hurt the #girlchild. The scripts were based on #teenagepregnancies, #earlymarriages, #educationdenial, #peerpressure and #genderbasedviolence.
The students were grouped into groups of 4 which included both #girlchild and #boychild, however each group had a girl team leader. The idea was to instill confidence, leadership abilities and #collaborativelearning. On script writing completion, each team presented their script to the class.
We then setout to introduce SCRATCH and how to animate using it. Each group was then tasked with an #animation project on their script. As they were working on their projects, we tasked Athman Omar Kahindi, himself a product of Lamuka Hub now assisting in training others; to record the presentations. The YouTube video was recorded, compiled and edited by him.
We, at Lamuka Hub are honoured to have dedicated students. The students are currently putting finishing touches to their projects after which we shall host a webinar to screen all the #animations. These students all completed their final year in secondary (form four) in 2021. We can see a bright future in #ict for them.
On the #girlchild front, we still have lots of ground to cover! We started off with 16 girls but are left with 9, 7 dropped off. Despite several calls to get them to attend, we keep receiving reasons that mama has given me some tasks, have gone for a burial, don’t have fare etc. Lamuka Hub doesn’t charge any of its students a fee for the training. On the #boychild front 3 have dropped out. Check our earlier post of this at https://lnkd.in/dR6h3j-N
1 thought on “Girls in ICT”
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