This nice slogan of our YovoTogo (The march of the YovoTogo children toward the digital age) friends announced an easy season for the Togo 2020 computer campaign. In fact, all the equipment was available on our shelves early 2020, but as time went by, it turned out that this operation was more and more difficult to finalize, due to the pandemic that affected the entire world. Finally, the container was shipped, three months behind schedule, thanks to the good will of our CapTogo friends, who maintained their support projects for Togo, because as a matter of logistics they couldn’t wait for this health crisis to be over.
After these different shifts, the hardware arrived end of October at destination in the Dapaong area, located at 650 Kilometers [400 Miles] North of Lomé. And the official inaugurations of these three new computer rooms could be organized by our JUMP Lab’Orione friends, after the rooms were meticulously prepared.
- First of all, the morning of Friday November 13th, at the prestigious La Salle college, located in Dapaong.
- Then, in the afternoon of Friday November 13th, at the Dapaong town high school.
- And finally, Saturday November 14th, at the Pogno high school, one of the northernmost communes in Togo.
We are both very proud and very happy to be able to participate since 2016 to such a nice project, together with our YovoTogo and JUMP LabOrione friends. This project allowed the creation of 20 computer rooms in Togo, more specifically in the Savanna area, within which 11 trainer’s positions have been opened. All that made possible to introduce the Free Software concepts to more that 15 000 children, every year.
This year again, despite enormous difficulties, we were able to continue our actions in Togo, and take advantage of all these setbacks to remodel the YovoTogo and CapTogo web sites, and to create a brand new one from scratch, JUMP Lab’Orione, which was just inaugurated this week. This effort was made possible thanks to the invaluable advice of our friend Jean-Luc Mahé, together with the outstanding technical support of Mathieu Raisin, both being members of WebAssoc, and we want to thank them a lot here for their help, as all as this association which supports other associations developing their ungoogled digital information projects.
This 20th computer rooms id surely not the last one to be equiped in the Savanna region. All together we already planned the actions for the 2021 season, how we hope to be able to :
- Set up new computer rooms, thanks to the donation of the “Lycée Le Roc” [The Rock high school] supporting this project since 2017.
- Reinforce the equipment of our trainers and friends of JUMP Lab’Orione, who are working on site, improvements made possible thanks to the donation of 80 laptops made by the Bricos du Cœur that we thank for their support and the confidence they have in our project in Togo.
As the saying goes : « Alone you go faster, all together we go further »
Editor’s note: If you want to know with more details, about our common actions in Togo, we suggest you listen to this lengthy but detailed audio interview [in French, sorry] that we made for the “Penguin dads’ aperitif” site.