Swag from Janet’s perspective
Janet is born and raised in Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya. Kibera is one of the largest slums in Africa and living here is not an easy thing. Janet joined a school in the late 90s for a Kenya National Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) which took her 8 years to acquire. Thereafter, she joined a high school for a 4-year course in Kenya National Certificate of Secondary Education (KSCE). She sat my exams in November 2010 and attained a B minus (B -) of 58 points.
With the grade she attained, she knew that her dream to join a regular programme in computer science at any public university in Kenya and be a beneficiary of higher education loans board (HELB) was shuttered.
The board finances regular students with about 70 percent of their fees which the beneficiaries repay after they have finished their degree programmes and secured a job. Her only chance was to apply for a parallel degree which is a self-sponsored programme, but, like many of her friends, she did not have money to pay for large amounts of fees.
Her instincts were to find a job and raise finances for her personal upkeeps as she figured out her next actions regarding her college education. She secured a job in a supermarket and life seemed just fine until a year later, when she was sacked following a retrenchment due to inflation that had hit Kenya that year.
A month later, she secured another job at a local cyber cafe as an attendant. To quench her thirst to become a computer scientist, she started browsing for free online courses. She got quite a number of them but most required a reliable and high-speed internet which the cyber could not afford. One day while she was doing her usual work at the cyber, 2 guys came in and sat on one of the computers. She overheard in their conversation that there is a school which is run by a certain community-based organization (CBO) called Tunapanda Kibera CBO, that offered a 3-month intensive training in technology, design, and business. She followed up with the story and decided to apply for the course and test her luck. She applied and the school management invited her for an interview 2 weeks later, which went well for her. She was asked to join the program a week later.
The school used the Swag platform. It encourages a peer-to-peer model of learning to help trainees develop a growth mindset and acquire teamwork skills in addressing the challenges that their communities face. After the 3-month program, she was selected to join an apprenticeship program, which is a program focused on advanced skills acquisition for 6 months.
During her apprenticeship, she got a chance to dig deeper into the Swag system and learned how its backend was structured. The system is based on WordPress and relies on plugins and libraries such as H5P. It is comprised of swagpaths, which are a group of courses that are related, and swagifacts, which are a group of related concepts within each swagpath. She learned how to create these swagpaths and swagifacts as well as setup an instance of the system on my computer. She also learned how to synchronize the swagpaths and the swagifacts from the remote server to her computer, with an aim of cloning the learning model of the school back in her village after her apprenticeship program ended.
As her apprenticeship program ended, she went back to her village at Laini Saba and started a cyber which grew to become the first IT ‘hub’ in the area. The ‘hub’ runs on Linux and it uses the Swag system to teach people technological approaches of value creation and problem-solving. The skills she acquired from Tunapanda Institute and the Swag system have helped her to help others with much ease. Her dream is to help her trainees replicate the model in their villages, and since the model requires less skilled teachers and low or no bandwidth at all, she is confident that she can achieve this. The only time you need a fast and reliable internet is when synchronizing content from the remote server to your local server which takes only a few minutes to complete.