The latest from Geekcorps, Ghana ( Introducing MOPGEL - Liberia )

Jopie has just sent the latest on his experiences as a Geekcorps Ghana volunteer.

In this letter he is writing about a Liberian NGO called MOPGEL:

"Yesterday i visited the Liberian refugee camp here close to Accra - it is called Buduburam and has been in existence for about 14 years with more than 40 000
liberian refugees who came to Ghana to escape the wars that has been destroying their country for the past decades.

I went to visit a guy there that is running a small NGO project called MOPGEL - Movement for the Promotion
of Gender Equality in Liberia.

The guy, Hisenburg Togba, showed me his little computer center where they
provide basic computer literacy and office skills.

They got about 20 computers (of which 8 works) no network, no internetline and one old printer. With this they manage to give hour-long classes and sessions for about 10 hours of the day!

http://www.mopgel.org/

I would love to get involved with this project and hoping that maybe you can give me some advice - for one thing i would love to move their focus to opensource and try and get some funding to fix computers, to provide training for trainers, to get
connectivity to name but a few issues that needs to addressed.

This project is currently in operation in the refugee camp but of course their vision is to get more and more action inside Liberia itself. Liberia must be one
of the least connected countries in Africa. Illiteracy is somewhere in the 80% because the social fabric and services like schools totally broke down during the war. Now at last they had democratic election and everybody is very optimistic and there is huge movement to rebuild the country. I believe the opportunity to make use of ICT technologies in this process can be invaluable."