The rural ICT Centre at Nohata Bangladesh

In August of 2008, Dr. Mannan Mridha, the project coordinator of the rural ICT Centre at Nohata visited the local project partners. During the trip, Dr. Mridha noticed growing interest among the pupils that are taking part in the project. The project was initiated two years ago with SPIDER funding and promotes access to medical information for the rural health care providers.

The ICT Centre that is housed in a girls' school and college has also been training the girls on the use of computers and the Internet. There are more than 500 girls who are now in the pipeline for this training program.

A visit took place at a nearby boys' school where the pupils where informed about the importance and the benefit of acquiring ICT skills in their future education as well as the importance of ICT as a whole in the society. The rural ICT centre in the village of Nohata is facing the challenge to train an additional group of students, 500 boys from the nearby secondary school. All the boys from class six to ten were equally enthusiastic to start training programme at the ICT centre. It was a difficult task to choose which class to start with. However, it was decided to start from the junior class and with the wish to soon extend the facilities to include other classes.

Dr. Mannan Mridha, Royal Institute of Technology