ICT RESOURCE CENTRE FOR OKORASE (PAGE 19)

CHILD Rights International (CRI), a non-governmental organisation, has set up an information and communications technology (ICT) resource centre furnished with 100 laptops for children at Okorase, a cocoa-growing community in the Suhum-Kraboa-Coaltar District in the Eastern Region.
The centre, connected to the Internet, is aimed at making ICT available to children in the community, to improve the quality of teaching and learning in basic schools, as well as enhance the living standards of the people.
The initiative, which forms part of the One Child One Laptop Project, is being supported by the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare.
Addressing the inauguration ceremony, the Executive Director of CRI, Mr Bright Appiah, said the initiative was made possible through a collaborative effort between the CRI Ghana and the One Child One Laptop Project, based in the United States of America.
He added that through the initiative of the CRI, some university students from the Derek Richardson-Hunter College and the Monroe College, both in the US, had been invited into the country to teach the beneficiary schools in the community.
He noted that the provision of ICT facilities to children at early ages would help to develop their skills to compete equally with their counterparts in urban areas.
According to him, society’s failure to provide children with appropriate information over the years had resulted in a situation where children had resorted to using all sorts of information at their disposal to seek knowledge, to the detriment of their development.
He said that had led to a number of children engaging in armed robbery, child prostitution, child labour and Internet fraud, adding that “we have neglected our basic duty and the outcome of our negligence as stakeholders has contributed to Internet crime and occultism in educational systems”.
He, therefore, advised parents and guardians to devote more time and resources to their children and wards to enable them to grow up as responsible citizens.
The National Programme Manager of the National Programme for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour (NPECLC), Mrs Rita Owusu-Amankwaah, said education had been identified as the key to the eradication of poverty and child labour and pointed out that the importance of computer literacy for the academic development of children in today’s global world could not be over.
The Suhum-Kraboa-Coaltar District Director of Education, Mrs Gifty Asiedu-Okantah, commended the CRI and its partners for the gesture, which she noted would improve teaching and learning in the communities and the district as a whole.