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Tablets for talent development in Malawi
A pilot project has been launched to change the educational situation in Malawi - with the help of tablet computers. The German Development Bank KfW will join the project in 2018. The primary school teacher Sithembile Naming'ona reports about her expierence with it.
“At my primary school in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, we have 968 pupils and 19 teachers. There are often more than 80 children in our classrooms, sometimes 120 and in some schools in Malawi even up to 250, so it is of course difficult for the children to concentrate or for us to specifically support individual pupils.
But we are lucky. Since 2013 we have been part of the project ”Unlocking Talent through Technology in Malawi“: A learning centre has been set up in our school – with 30 tablet computers on which pupils can work independently. Since then we divide them into groups and send them to the learning centre every day. There, each child has the tablet to himself for half an hour a day. The digital teacher asks questions – in our language Chichewa – and the pupils answers them. The examples in the exercises are also adapted to our living conditions.
The children are doing well! Above all, however, they learn at their own speed, which would hardly be possible in large classes. In normal lessons we can observe later that the children participate much better. Some contents are already known to them and they can repeat and apply them. The pupils are motivated and enjoy coming to school because they come along better. Sometimes even pupils from other schools come by who would like to learn on the computer themselves.
We are pleased about this – especially because the German Government will support the project in the future through KfW. This support will enable 200 additional learning centres to be set up, where around 200,000 pupils will benefit from the new opportunities.”
© KfW