Camara stands for 3 main principles:
1. Poverty is unacceptable in the 21st century.
2. Education is the key to students’ success and career.
3. Modern technology helps radically improve education.
Following these principles, Camara has established 8 educational hubs and several sub-hubs in Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Ireland and Lesotho. Here is how it works:
Camara is actively monitoring the situation in underserved areas of undeveloped countries. Many students have limited or no access to modern digital education and thus cannot benefit from 21st century technology to the fullest extent.
Once an area for improvement is chosen, Camara develops an educational program tailored for students in this particular region, which will help them gain all prerequisite knowledge to progress through their education cycle with the intent of improving life opportunities for these beneficiaries. Camara scale these programmes through either sales driven approaches directly to schools using a social enterprise ethos, or through donor funding that allows programmes to be deployed in more underserved areas. Educational hubs are established in target regions. This allows Camara to understand the context in which they work in better and create a sustainable social enterprise model that serves the community greater. The model of deployment looks at the use of hardware, quality content and software that supports effective learning and the support of teachers to use the content and resources and finally leadership support for school leaders. To ensure impact is being made and understood, Camara put in place robust monitoring and evaluation systems in each country.
The Camara approach or theory of change focuses on ensuring learners have access to quality technology enabled learning environments to improve their learning and education outcomes. They believe that with access to relevant quality resources and content and provided with sufficient time to engage with these resources, learners will be impacted greater than they would in traditional classroom environments. By making learning exciting for both learners and teachers, positive impacts on the learner and the overall system that learners progress within will be achieved.
Camara is also very environment-friendly, as all computers and technology devices are delivered to schools are tracked until their end of life. They partner with local eWaste providers to gather end of life devices and recycle ethically in line with international standards therefore ensuring that the company leaves no negative imprint on the ecology. Such responsible approach to education and environmental protection helped Camara impact more than a one million eight hundred thousand learners since 2005.
The latest iKnowledge project by Camara involves launching a new hub in Tanzania, providing improved education and learning outcomes to more than 250 schools in the most underserved regions. It was launched with the support of the the UK Space Agency International Partnership Space Program (IPSP) and made possible due to the service provided by Avanti satellite internet coverage. Raccoon Gang developed and provided a tailored online learning platform called the Camara Learning Academy, based on Open edX technology, so that teachers of iKnowledge project are able to benefit from the world’s leading eLearning solution relevant to their teaching profession in Tanzania. This EdX installation is the first kiSwahili only Edx platform in the world. It is fully branded under Camara logo and design and utilizes multiple additions to standard Open edX LMS, which are invented and implemented by Raccoon Gang.
We are honored for the possibility to participate in such initiatives and we hope this is not the last Camara project we take part in, as providing efficient education is essential to alleviating poverty worldwide.
