Uganda’s laptop ownership program that initially targeted the civil service is moving onto school teachers and their students.
The Civil and Corporate Employees Computer Ownership Programme (CICOCO) is intended as a head start in the country’s e-government program. So far, the program has seen 4,000 government workers purchase the laptops.
Laptops for secondary-school through university-level students can now be acquired under the same terms and conditions as is the case for civil servants.
“The civil service scheme has been successful, but we have received overwhelming demand from the education sector, and we are talking about teachers and students on their own demanding for the laptops,” said State Minister for ICT Alintuma Nsambu.
Already, some 3,000 students from Uganda’s largest university, Makerere, have signed up to purchase the laptops, and hundreds of schools are expected to purchase them for their teachers.
The teachers’ laptops, which will sell for US$600, have the same specifications as those that have been made available to civil servants, said program coordinator Godfrey Seruwagi.
Each laptop includes a 120G-byte SATA hard disk, a 1G-byte memory chip of RAM, a 14-inch WXGA LCD (liquid crystal diode) screen and a 1.6GHz Pentium dual-core T2330 processor. It also come with a DVD writer, USB (Universal Serial Bus) port, integrated graphics, wireless Internet card, independent web camera, TV card and a home edition of Windows XP operating system.
The student version of the laptop will go for $450. It has been custom-made specifically for students’ needs with special software, Nsambu said.
Tropix Technology has committed $150 million in capital to the project, which was launched early in the year, and the company remains committed to Uganda, said Tropix president Dauglus Tausik. Tropix will also donate 50,000 desktop PCs to select schools for setting up school computer laboratories, he added.
The initial phase of the five-year project will see 1 million laptops imported into the country to meet the needs of both the civil and student/teacher programs.
Stanbic Bank Uganda has been joined by five other banks to aid in financing the machines, which are made by a consortium of companies and investors from the U.S., China and Australia.
Uganda’s ICT ministry is monitoring the project, which has support from the Chinese government through grants from Chinese development bank Exim.
