Objectives of the service
SWAY4Edu2 is a spin-off of Sway4edu (click HERE to be re-directed to the Sway4edu project web-page) and it aims at pursuing the following objectives:
- Assist rural children and teachers to be more techno savvy and become aware of the benefits that information and communication technologies bring with them
- Develop awareness amongst local youth, as well as amongst the wider community members, of the importance of preserving their local wildlife heritage and to adopt a more sustainable approach to daily living. This is crucial for Singita and SA government to keep tourism, the local communities and the conservation of the environment in harmonised balance
- Implement and validate a set of pilot edutainment services (e.g. small digital cinema in the classrooms, radio channels) to foster awareness and facilitate the utilisation of the system by the local communities
- Creating "twinning" activities between the South African schools and the Italian school to exchange educational, cultural and linguistic experiences
- Develop a partnership with the European and South African industry and partners to establish a scalable and sustainable service to meet the above objectives on a wider deployment scale
- Expand the current network of rural radio stations deployed in Sway4edu with additional 20 pilot sites to promote the “cloud” service, which allows radios to generate their own radio programmes and to share them online with the other radios, enabling collaborative post-production of the content before final FM broadcasting to the local communities.
- Develop added value applications for the rural radios via podcasting in order to support the access to stored audio content associated to local adverts via WiFi points of presence
- Develop a partnership with FAO, the European industry and DRC partners to establish a scalable and sustainable service to meet the above objectives on a wider deployment scale
- The utilisation figures of the end-users (e.g. completed courses, volume of traffic over Internet, access to the different applications) at each pilot site.
- The technical operational status of key hardware devices (e.g. satellite terminals, power supply units, PCs, tablets) at each pilot site.
Current Status
The Final Review was successfully achieved on 14th Dec 2017, pending the completion of the Contract Closure Documentation, which has been delivered and it is now with ESA for final approval.
The project has achieved remarkable social and commercial results along the following two main project elements: a) Space4edu in South Africa to teach teachers and students in rural areas in South Africa. The pilot activities with the 19 rural schools in South Africa have provided excellent results both in terms of utilisation by the schools and technical reliability. All the partners and stakeholders agree that the selected satcom technology and the overall service model used has proven to be reliable, easy to use and cost effective. The motivation, commitment and strong ownership of all the local partners has been key: not a single item got stolen or damaged! Singita (SA) has already paid to the service provider Openet a service fee for the internet connectivity and access to the eLearning platform covering the period Nov2017-Jan2018. Negotiations are on-going to involve also the Department of Education of Mpumalanga (SA) to extend the service subscriptions on yearly basis; b) Radio broadcast stations in rural areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo to teach journalists and support the creation of ad-hoc radio programs in favour of capacity building and food security. The pilot stage in 20 rural radios of DRC was also successfully concluded with all 70 subscribed journalists who have completed all the eLearning modules. Commercial service subscriptions for about 20 radios in DRC are being investigated
Prime Contractor(s)
Subcontractor(s)
