Activities for NAVTI Foundation Cameroon

ICT Program

In a bid to assist the under privileged, the foundation designed packages to help them acquire more skills which would enable them to transform their lives. Having seen that most of its community members were dependent on agriculture for a living the foundation set about developing alternative sources of income generating so as to alleviate poverty.

One potential area identified was a good capacity build package hence poverty alleviation tool is computer education. It is our strong belief that running these programs will help us assist the under privileged.

This field offers wide avenues for employment and is a skill, which is widely being needed in our modern world to advance communication. Our field of under privileged covers the rural population hence our program will be to create computer literacy programs in rural areas. This is to assist them in becoming computer literate so as to gain employment or become self employed and improve rural communication in a bide to alleviate their poverty situation.

This program is jointly managed in partnership with SBIGWEB Common Initiative Group. Our information and communication training program is under our computer academy scheme, which has started with the creation community computer training centres.

The first operating centre can be found at our headquarters in Tobin, Kumbo where we offer computer software packages such as MS Excel, MS Word, PageMaker, MS PowerPoint, Programming languages and other basic computer education software. We are hoping to expand shortly to hardware. We offer 1, 3 and 6 months crash programs and 9 month full software programs while our envisaged hardware classes shall run for up to 18 months. We have a strong staff and we are looking forward to expanding our services to preparing our students for International examinations like C+, N+ and Microsoft Certifications in the near future.

With the support of Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), we received 100 computers of which we donated some to schools and some to 5 computer centres created in Oku, Ndu, Nkambe, Mbiame and Nkar towns. These centres, in a bid to improve computer literacy, have trained about 1210 students both on part time and full time bases. We have organised short training programs for most head of services around our administrative units including secretaries of various offices, teachers, groups which last from 1 week to 3 months and refresher courses for part time personnel. So far these programs have trained about 475 staff from different organisations, we could do more but unfortunately lack the required infrastructure.

Over holiday periods we organise classes for students teaching basic computers knowledge and helping to keeping them occupied. We have trained 10 disabled students and HIV/AIDS orphaned students for free and assisted most of our graduates in finding jobs.

Additionally we have offered documentation services to other organisations at cheaper rates to allow them organize there information easily. We have the lowest schools fees around town (€8) so as to bring computer literacy to the under privileged.

However, we still lack sufficient infrastructure, we need about 1000 computers for 2007/08 to distribute to schools for their school ICT projects and to other less privileged towns and serve more rural people. As such it is our priority is to start more capacity building programs like Cisco, A+, C++, Web Development and Microsoft Certifications.