Here at Seismonaut we like digging deeper, digging differently and looking in less obvious and less well-researched areas. This has given us a number of interesting projects to work on, one of which took me to Nigeria last week.

Seismonaut was recently awarded a contract financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark. We have been asked to conduct a study on how computer supported learning programs are transforming the educational sector in developing countries. In a knowledge-based society, digital technology is a gateway to economic and social progress. Yet two-thirds of the world’s people today live in countries with less than three percent PC penetration. Amongst the many initiatives seeking to change that – two global initiatives stand out: The One Laptop Per Child initiative and Intel’s World Ahead program.

This week I have been traveling across Nigeria studying the effect of these two projects, interviewing a large number of inspiring people from the educational sector. Tuesday I spent the day with David Ibhawoh, Intel’s Business Development Manager for Sub Saharan Africa. David gave me an inspiring introduction to the World Ahead Program – a 1 billion dollars philanthropic initiative by Intel, that provides technology, and resources that encourage computer suppored learning. As a central part of this initiative Intel has developed the classmate PC, a rugged (intel-powered) laptop designed especially for the educational sector.

One of the schools in Nigeria currently piloting the Classmate PC, is Jabi Secondary School. With wireless Internet access across the school campus and 300 laptops which are made available for teachers to use in their classes, this secondary school is light years ahead of the average Nigerian secondary school where even just having a decent blackboard is a luxury.

Wednesday I headed out to say hi to my friends, the wonderful children at Galadima Primary School. I visited the school a couple of months ago and it was great to be back. All 350 kids have been given an XO laptop (the laptop formerly known as the “100 dollar laptop”). I spent the afternoon at the school and had a good talk with Asabe Yabani who oversees the pilot project, and also met with the headmaster of the school. Not long after my arrival a fourth grader came up to me and wanted to show me the drawings he had made on the laptop. It was impressive stuff and included a beautiful map of Africa. Another boy met me as I was about to leave the school. He introduced himself as the chief engineer of the school and said that he was the one that helped fix the laptops when something was broken. Wow!

I am now busy putting it all together into a report. Would you have interest in the public version of the report do drop a comment in this post.