Childrens Charitable Foundation

Location: Kumasi, Ghana
Po Box 4481 Kumasi
Tel: 0268330902
0203749455

The editor of this web has spent quite some time in Ghana, and made several trips from the U.k ; in the visit between 15 ^th August 2010 & March the 25 ^th efforts were put in to see what could be done with ICT in Ghana.

It was a challenging and an interesting time, to say the least and I made vists to the Ministry of Education,Ministry of Tourism in Accra and also Government departments in Kumasi. I have interests in using Linux as a tool for learning and my partner had visions of a women and children support charity.

A lot of time was spent working out the best way forward, dealing with issues and bylaws; Ghana seems to have inherited an excessive civil service procedure for a developing Country from the British, which seems out of context with the situation.

For instance I decided to go for a Ghanaian driving license & had to do a brief test. At one stage they to look down a binocular microscope contraption, I said whats this for ? Its to make sure you can see lorries and the such like at 25 yards!My bottom jaw nearly hit the desk.

Anyway we put together a constitution and submitted documents which were a legal wrapper for the charity called "CoLCage" we were told it would take several weeks & returned to the U.K ;we then had to negotiate over the phone back in the U.K after being told the acronym of our charity clashed with somebody elses charity.
Why did we set up this NGO in the first place ?

We have identified that there are various issues with ICT in Ghana. Firstly Ghana is a developing Country where the average wage as of 2011 is around 50 pounds per month. Thus there is real constraints on purchasing a legal disc or download of an operating system like Windows, especially when around every two years another version needs to be purchased otherwise security updates soon become unavailable for the outdated version. Cloned windows also suffers from the same problem

Linux is a perfect solution as an operating system for use in a developing county , but Linux is hardly known in Ghana , the lack of awareness of Linux being indicated by www.linux.org which states there is no recognized Linux user group in Ghana.

The Ghana Government has indicated its wish to progress with ICT , and that ICT questions in examinations will be more prominent. However in a survey we carried out in the Weija area of Accra some schools did not have a single computer, and one private school had only one computer working out of five,

None of the schools had any specialized childrens educational software installed. By actively introducing Linux which is issued under a Gnu General Public license we believe we can help children learn ICT through the educational software , and present to Ghanaians that there is a choice in obtaining legal software for free in most cases or at a fraction of the cost of some other software.

Mission statement

To take the Geek out of computing and make ICT simple for everyone to learn. Putting it succinctly "what one fool can learn so can another "

Vision To fully disperse the Linux operating system into Ghana and introduce its benefits Establish a training center building for the teaching of ICT and for general education of under privileged children, and through education lead them to their successful future
The revised name of the charity also lends itself for us to have a broader scope in our activities.