THE PROBLEM

Most ICT project for schools fail because the schools are left to deal with maintenance of the project after the ICT Centre must have been established either by Government, an NGO, an Individual  or a company through it's CSR budget.

These Public Schools are usually not well funded and therefore are unable to fund  the maintenance of the Centre after they have been established.

Typically, the Centre will run for a while, depending on the duration of the initial service support  agreement with the contractor and how much funding is available for fuel from the school. Then stops running when the burden of maintenance kicks in.

Most times, by the time the Donor comes back, the place is locked up and the cobwebs inside is a typical sign that it hasn't been used for a while. This scenario is typical with Public Schools.

Private schools do not have these problems as they can afford to buy and maintain ICT facilities from fees collected from Pupils. They sometimes charge for ICT  separately.

THE SOLUTION

The cost of the following recurrent expenditure associated with maintenance is the primary cause of failure of these projects.

1. Cost of fueling  Generators

2. Cost of maintenance of Generators (Servicing, Part replacement etc)

3. Cost of maintaining the PCs (Software and Hardware)

4. In cases where Internet access is included, cost of subscription.

A good solution to this problem is one that takes away the cost of maintenance from these public Schools, such that after deployment the

schools can use this equipment satisfactorily for many years.

The downside of these is that most donors would not want to be bogged down with these responsibilities. They might take it up for a few months or a year but not forever.

OUR SOLUTION

Our ICT Centre solution addresses these problems in a unique way.

Firstly, Our hardware are selected and combined in such a way that energy consumption is very low. The system consumes eight times less energy than conventional Systems. With this level of consumption it is now possible to include affordable solar generators as a means of power supply.

Secondly, most of the hardware that do the major work in such an environment are solid state equipment and therefore need little or no maintenance. They can work for years without requiring attention.

Thirdly, the network configuration deployed makes maintenance of software extremely easy as it is done from a central point. This also makes it easy to maintain a clean network.

Fourthly, we have a system where maintenance of servers, due to serious malware activities, have been simplified and can be carried out by a designated  staff of the school. Equally, remote support is available on servers with Internet access.

As a result of these ICT model, These four cardinal solutions makes it possible now for a Donor to deploy an ICT Centre in a public school and be sure to meet it working year in year out. Thereby serving it's purpose fully.