Build a Computer Classroom for Zanzibar Students

Hello from Zanzibar!

2022 has already been a great year for Welcome Ideas.  At the end of 2021 we completed all of the classes that had been interrupted by the COVID pandemic and earlier this year we selected 32 new students from a huge applicant pool to join Welcome Ideas!   Those students joined our existing students who are completing our latest round of short courses in just a few weeks time.  We have already begun recruiting for our next round of short courses and are putting plans in place to offer our certificate courses in September, contingent on our successful registration with the Vocational Training Authority.

In February we partnered with the Zanzibar Ministry of Health to vaccinate all of our students and staff.  As of the end of March, just over 5% of Tanzania’s population was fully vaccinated, so we were very excited to have this opportunity for our students.  We are very proud of our students, who continue to be leaders and role models in their communities as we work to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic together.

Thanks to your continued generosity and support, we started this set of short courses with projectors mounted in both our computer classroom and our largest teaching classroom.  Having projectors mounted to the ceiling or wall is only something seen in a couple of university lecture halls here in Zanzibar, so our students are extremely proud of the upgrades we’ve made to the facility.  We can now project from our laptops to the projectors wirelessly from anywhere in the building.  In the computer classroom students will be able to project their work on the screen without having to manually connect to the projector.  This gives us an incredible opportunity to make our classes much more interactive and engaging for the students.

In the last update we discussed our plans to install satellite internet in the school, but in January we discovered that fiberoptic internet was going to be available in our neighborhood (Kiembe Samaki).  For the last few months, we have been working with the national telecom company, TTCL, to determine the cost and potential timing of the installation.  The benefit of fiberoptic cable over satellite is that satellite speeds can often be slowed or stopped by storms.  In addition,  we have the opportunity to expand our bandwidth to much greater speeds in the future with the fiberoptic internet option.  We are working hard to make sure that the option we chose makes the most sense for the future growth of the organization and is the best use of our limited financial resources.  We hope that we have the new internet installed by the next update so that we can begin incorporating it into our IT curriculum.

Our IT classes continue to be our most popular courses.  During this most recent set of short courses we offered two Beginning IT in Tourism classes.  Every single computer is being utilized and we have a words per minute typing competition underway between the two classes which has led to students coming in before class and staying late after class to practice their new typing skills.  Our beginning IT students are already creating eye catching documents in Word and analytical spreadsheets in Excel.  We appreciate your support as we continue to expand our IT offerings and better utilize the resources in our computer classroom.

We’re excited for all that 2022 has to bring.  Thank you for continuing to be a part of the Welcome Ideas success story!

We are so excited to share some great news about Welcome Ideas! At the end of October, the Zanzibar Commission for Labour issued Kenn’s work permit and the following week – the first week in November - we restarted the courses that had been cut short by the pandemic.  In mid-December we completed two Beginning IT courses, one Intermediate IT course, a Tourism Leadership Development course, an Introduction to Tourism course, a Cultural Heritage in Tourism course, and a Tourism in the Sharing Economy course.  It is great having the students back in school and has brought new life back into the building.

In January we will interview another group of potential students for our next round of short courses.  Those short courses will commence in January, and we hope to begin our certificate courses in the early spring.  We have several hundred potential students anxiously awaiting our next intake, so we’re excited to continue adding to the number of students we serve from the local community.

Our IT courses continue to be some of the most popular courses that we offer, and we are anxious to start training our students on our new student email system, our new online library, and our catalog of online courses.  Your continued support has helped acquire new technology and continue to pay for the internet, which remains a large expense for the school.  We are looking into satellite internet which will offer us higher bandwidth at a lower cost than the LTE internet we currently use.  The installation costs for the satellite internet are significant, but our monthly internet costs would drop and our bandwidth would increase significantly.  The satellite internet also offers us the opportunity to increase our bandwidth even more in the future as we begin helping students create their own websites and manage a number of online business functions.

Prior to opening the school, we conducted reorientation sessions for all of our students on our new COVID-19 prevention procedures.  It’s been a challenge for everyone getting used to social distancing, wearing masks, and having smaller classes; but our students have adapted well and are becoming role models within their communities of how to help curb the pandemic.  As we look forward, we know that the pandemic will remain a challenge that we will need to adapt to and prepare for as we continue to ramp up our programs at Welcome Ideas.

Thank you for your continued support of our program and a special thanks to those of you who helped us during Giving Tuesday and this holiday season.  This has been a challenging time for charitable organizations around the world and we could not survive without your generous support.

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays,

The Welcome Ideas Team

Links:

• Our new online library
• Welcome Ideas Newsletters