LinuxIT makes a clear commitment to conducting ethical business. As part of this obligation, we regularly support local and national charities. Our chosen charities of the year 2009 are the Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Society, and the Rainbow Centre in Bristol.
Great Ormond Street Hospital
Great Ormond Street Hospital is a specialist hospital, housing the widest range of paediatric specialities in the country, including medical, surgical and diagnostic. The majority of children being treated are very young, on average 3 year's old, and many are seriously ill with life threatening conditions.
The Rainbow Centre
The Rainbow Centre provides free and professional support to children and their families affected by bereavement, life threatening illness and cancer.
The Centre offers art, play and music therapy, counselling, homoeopathy and massage therapy, and LinuxIT supports these activities through both regular monetary contributions and participation in challenge events raising sponsorship.
Support of the United Nations Development Program
LinuxIT Europe Ltd has made a huge contribution to the United Nations Development Programme. Its CEO, Peter Dawes-Huish, has been unstinting in his support and financial contribution and has worked tirelessly, with no personal benefit, to ensure that the United Nations and some of the most disadvantaged people in the world benefit from high quality training by developing LPI training manuals that were donated to the UN.
Charitable Projects
Project Overview
NoPC is a charitable organisation dedicated to improving the access and quality of education available to Third World countries. It believes that digital inclusion through ICT has a critical role to play in making this happen. One of its educational projects in Tanzania had become unviable. LinuxIT was tasked with coming up with an innovative, rapid and reliable solution to meet key criteria. The solution provided met all the challenges, and provided a scalable model for NoPC.
Summary
NoPC is a charitable organisation dedicated to improving the access and quality of education available to Third world countries. It believes that digital inclusion through ICT has a critical role to play in making this happen.
In 2002 NoPC delivered schoolroom PC's connected to the internet in Tanzania. Five schools took part. The result was enormously beneficial and led to school attendance rising from 60% in 2005 to 97% in 2007, and pupil attainment. However, the maintenance and support of PC's in remote locations proved to be a huge challenge and the decision was taken that the project, in its current form, was not viable.
For this reason in 2009 the NoPC approached LinuxIT with a brief to devise and implement a rapid and reliable internet and desktop computing solution to serve digitally under-privileged areas. Central to the brief was a solution to incur minimum support costs and use hardware that could be maintained locally, by non IT staff.
LinuxIT brought commercial rigor to the project approaching it like any other it conducts when implementing and supporting mission critical systems for customers in the private and public sectors. We approached the project scoping, design and build in the same way. A scope of works was agreed, followed by a design and implementation process before a final acceptance test by NoPC. At each stage prototypes were delivered for testing and comments for the design and build team. The build was assigned a duration of 4 weeks and was delivered on time.
Impact
The project led to increased student enrolment with the percentage of children in school increasing from 60% in 2000 to 97% in 2005. Encouraged by the outcome of the project the number of secondary schools in Tanzania has grown from 1,202 in 2005 to 3,185 in 2009. The project required teachers ICT skills to be developed and this lead to more teachers being trained in ICT. Both those in schools and those in the country's 32 teacher education colleges where 16,700 student teachers now have enhanced ICT skills. The model is likely to be implemented by NoPC In Grenada this year.
