Integrated Development Africa Programme (IDAP) has great belief in the hopes, potentials, and capabilities of community-level groups. It has also been humbled by the sheer innovativeness, optimism and tenacity of the rural communities in pursuing noble goals they believe in. For a long time, development practitioners, including state agencies, corporate sectors, the academia and civil society organizations, have been unable to appreciate the utility value, the empowering potential and poverty-reducing component of the emergent Information Communication and Technologies (ICTs).

Development and the improvement of quality of life for rural people are often limited to the access to basic education, health services, water, and sanitation and, of late, access to credit for rural women. While these are important social development benchmarks, they nonetheless form the necessary and sufficient requisites for comprehensive response for the enhancement of quality of life of the rural populations. The Center for Local Initiatives in Communication for Human Empowerment (CLICHÉ), which we plan to set up is, therefore, IDAP’s modest contribution to the efforts of these communities to succeed against all the odds and adversities. It is for this reason that the IDAP has come up with this intervention strategy to try and connect the rural areas with the rest of the world in the area of ICT.

In Siaya County rural, primary schools like Anduro, Pap Boro, Mulaha, Liganwa and Awelo, just to mention a few that we are working with often serve as the center of their communities. Primary school teachers are viewed as respected educators and community leaders. Primary schools, unlike secondary schools, are usually constructed and supported directly by the community, and host pupils solely from the local area. Most community residents remember fondly their time spent attending elementary school, time and again the highest level of education they received.

Residents feel much more comfortable entering and working with primary schools than they might unfamiliar high schools or universities. Most of these primary schools and their pupils have not benefited from Programmes giving computers for education and it is our intension to facilitate this. With CLICHÉ our ICT Programme, we feel that it is very important that children receive computer exposure as early as possible and we shall try everything possible to achieve this particular objective.

By utilizing primary schools Anduro, Pap Boro, Mulaha, Liganwa and Awelo, as a pilot of this project, we will be able to not only provide ICT resources to a sector of the school system not yet targeted by similar Programmes, but more importantly we will be able to access the existing network primary school teachers possess within their communities as role models in their rural societies and use them as good will ambassadors for the Programme. Our project’s primary goal is to work with the schools and the local community leaders first, and to ensure that rural Kenya receives the technology and training that it really needs.

The Digital Divide between Rural and Urban Kenya and Africa at large is immense: While most comparisons of technology levels occur between the highest examples of technology in comparative cultures (for example between Tokyo and Nairobi), in Africa the most pressing disparity lies between the large cities and the rural communities. Lack of good transportation systems (roads, railways, air) and infrastructure (phone lines, internet) etc., as well as lack of housing facilities makes implementation of ICT especially difficult in the rural areas. However, it is also these areas that can most benefit from technology.

The development of laying fiber optic cable to connect the region with other parts of the world provides the opportunity to make maximum use of ICT as a technology. However, as of yet, there is little understanding of the possible benefits from modern communication technology particularly in the rural areas. This is due to a lack of awareness and understanding on the part of villagers. Technology has never been a part of life and therefore ones world-view does not make use of technology in confronting challenges. This is also due to a lack of awareness of outside cultures and their ways of life, including those in larger cities. Rural areas must first be addressed before we can turn our focus on the divide between Eastern Africa and other countries in Africa.