Grants:PEG/Abbas Mahmood/Wikipedia for Schools Project

Funded

This submission to the Wikimedia Foundation Grants Program was funded in the fiscal year 2010-11. This is a grant to an individual.

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This project has been funded, completed, and a project report has been reviewed and accepted by WMF Staff.
To review a list of other funded submissions by fiscal year, please visit the Requests subpage, and to review the WMF Grants Program criteria for funding please visit the Grants:Index.

Legal name of chapter: Wikimedia Kenya
Grant contact name: Abbas Mahmood
Grant contact user-name or e-mail: abbasjnr [at] hotmail [dot] com
Grant contact title (position): Co-founder
Project lead name: Abbas Mahmood
Project lead user-name or e-mail: abbasjnr [at] hotmail [dot] com
Project lead title (position), if any

Full project name: Wikipedia for Schools Pilot Project
Amount requested (in USD): 6620
Provisional target start date: January 2011
Provisional completion date: March 2011

Budget breakdown

FIXED COSTS
Projector & Screen: USD 1810
Storage devices:- 2 packs of CDs: USD 40
-Flash disks 4GB: USD 140
Photocopy [Wikipedia pamphlets/completion certs, etc] : USD 190
Communication [tel + internet]: USD 225
Badges: USD 15

VARIABLE COSTS
i. Mombasa
Return transport: USD 225
Transport within (for 5 days): USD 440
Food: USD 190
Accommodation: USD 380

ii. Nyeri
Return transport: USD 41
Transport within: USD 440
Food: USD190
Accommodation: USD 570

iii. Kakamega
Return transport: USD 173
Transport within: USD 440
Food: USD 190
Accommodation: USD 380

Previsit
i. Mombasa
Food: USD 32
Accommodation: USD 190
Internal transport: USD 13
Return transport from Nairobi: USD 38
ii. Nyeri
Food: USD 32
Accommodation: USD 95
Internal transport: USD 13
Return transport from Nairobi USD 7
iii. Kakamega
Food: USD 32
Accommodation: USD 63
Internal transport: USD 13
Return transport from Nairobi: USD 13

TOTAL: USD 6620

Notes:

There will be at most six members of the team per region. The 6 shall further divide into two groups, meaning two groups will be undetaking the project concurrently.
This means that at least 2 schools will be visited per day, and since we are approaching 10 schools per region, then it will take us 5 days to finish one region.
Therefore, the average cost per volunteer for the 5 days in, say Mombasa, would be $206, Breakdown:

return transport=$37.5
transport within=$73
food=$32
accommodation=$63

The purpose of the previsit is for us to liaise and agree with the schools onto when is the perfect time for us to come, as most schools follow a fixed timetable, it would be almost impossible for us to go to a school without notice. We could have contacted the schools via phone or email, rather than conducting a more expensive phsical pre-visit, but most of these public schools do not have a website or a reliable directory of contacts. The budget has catered for the previsit for 1 volunteer per region.

Project scope

Wikimedia Kenya would like to bridge the digital divide in Kenya. We hope to use Wikipedia inorder to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goal #2: Universal Primary Education.

We have decided to start this project with a pilot of 3 regions in Kenya, namely Mombasa, Nyeri and Kakamega. We shall visit at least ten schools from each of these 3 regions. After the implementation of the pilot, we will assess our observations and experiences and hopefully come up with a countrywide project later on.

The project shall involve installing offline Wikipedia onto school computers and giving out talks to both teachers and students on how to use and gain maximum benefit when using Wikipedia.

Project goal

The goal of this project is to provide Kenyan students and teachers an opportunity to access a rich source of information and knowledge through the downloading of non-Internet required versions of Wikipedia onto school computers.

Non-financial requirements

We would need some copies of Offline Wikipedia books/PediaPress as well as some Wikimedia merchandise to distribute to the various schools that we will visit.

Fit to strategy

This project will enable students and teachers who could not afford internet access to still be able to use and gain benefit from using the offline version of Wikipedia.

Other benefits

Measures of success

We will consider the pilot project a success if we manage to undertake this project in all the 30 schools in the three regions.
We will have delivered over 60 hours of giving Wikipedia talks to both teachers and students. [An average of 2 hours of talks shall be given per school: one tals for teachers and one for students]
We expect to receive positive feedback from the teachers and they might want to explore the use of Wikipedia in the classroom as well.
Each school has an average of 500 students. We therefore expect this project to have a massive impact in terms of Wikipedia usership.
We will also consider the project a success if the teachers yearn for more expansive Wikipedia content, and hence use the online Wikipedia as well.
There are an average of 20 teachers per school. We therfore expect that more than 600 teachers will benefit from the awareness and use of Wikipedia.
We will provide an audit 2 months later to receive feedback from the schools that we visited inorder to discuss how, if at all, the project assisted them in their studies.