Oakwood Park Grammar School is partnered with Elmina JHS in Ghana and this year we are helping them to build their IT room.
 
Elmina JHS takes children from 11 to 19. Teaching there is hard as the students have little access to books or to the internet. So far they have raised enough money to buy a laptop and a projector to use in the classroom and their local Rotary Club gives them money to pay for the internet ‘dongle’ every year. However, one computer is not enough for all those children. They now have a secure IT room, but no computers!  The hope is that once they are able to equip the school the students will quickly pick up computer processing skills which will in turn give them access to better learning aids and the ability to communicate with the rest of the world.
 
Most of the students’ parents live and work in the capital and access to the internet would allow them to communicate more easily and make living away from home a bit more bearable. When some of the Ghanaian teachers came to visit our school in 2016, they were moved to tears by how our students could research and bring their own ideas and knowledge into the classroom. We hope to give Elmina students the same freedom to learn about the wide world they live in.
 
Currently Elmina has a room but no computers! We have been working with London based IT businesses and Oakwood parents to get them to donate second hand computers, screens, keyboards etc and we are raising money at Oakwood to pay for them to be cleaned up, packaged and delivered to the school. Our goal is to provide them with at least 30 functioning computers and a projector in 2017 if possible.