By Anne Mugisa and Mikaili Sseppuya

THE first of four information and communication technology (ICT) regional centres to aid disadvantaged children has been launched. The facilities meant to help the children access education information online, was on Monday commissioned at Kiswa Primary School, Kampala by the Commonwealth Secretary General, Don McKinnon.

The project is sponsored up by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Uganda and Indian governments. Other centres will be established all over the country after the initial four.

The project, codenamed “Hole in the Wall” and first in Africa, is part of the ICT transfer and sharing among the Commonwealth member states.

It is part of the activities to commemorate CHOGM 2007 being held in Kampala.

McKinnon noted that the Commonwealth countries still needed to help all children access information for their development.

He said an estimated 70 million children in the Commonwealth may never access education, meaning ICT is out of their reach.

“If children don’t access ICT, they are marginalised. If there are children who are uneducated, we pay the price in the end,” he warned.

“This is to provide unconditional and unsupervised access to computers by disadvantaged children aimed at aiding their learning,” the Indian minister for foreign affairs, Madhvani said.

He added that the Commonwealth and India were to undertake a pan-African computer network project of 53 countries connected through satellite and optic fibre networks to provide online education and tele-medicine.

The project, Madhvani said, would connect 12 universities, seven in India and five in Africa. There would be 53 tele-medicine centres in Africa connected to 17 super specialty hospitals, 12 in India and five African.

The ICT minister, Ham Mulira, said lessons from the Kiswa project would be used to set up the other centres upcountry.

He said the project would facilitate youth, especially the disadvantaged, gain computer knowledge and skills.

It would reduce the digital divide between communities in both rural and urban, with rural communities accessing the internet, he added.

Mulira said despite interventions like removal of import taxes on computers, some people could not afford them. Most affected, he said are youth from rural and peri-urban areas.

The Maltan foreign affairs minister and chairman of Commonwealth Connects project, Dr. Michael Frendo, said the project would aid transfer of skills within the member states.