The first internet-enabled school lab has been commissioned in a public primary school in South Sudan. Juba One primary school got the facility to impact education.
“We want engineers out of you; we want doctors out of you,” Engineer Stephen Lugga Juma, undersecretary of the ministry of Telecommunications, the top telecommunications public service job, tells the pupils.
He also added that, it was the stand of the International Telecommunications Union that telecommunications is now a right.
In his remark, Khumbulani Dhlomo, Head of Corporate Services, MTN South Sudan said: “Our focus at MTN Group is around education in areas of interest that caters for diversities in the markets that we operate in.”
According to him, the venture grew out of MTN South Sudan CEO Mr. Philip Besiimire’s passion for development.
“He always asks me, ‘What legacy do we want to leave in South Sudan when we go back to our motherlands – we can’t just put up a network and do nothing for the community?”
The goal of the lab project is to capture talent at its freshest and earliest development stage and ensure that children have love, appreciation and passion for ICT and knowledge in general.
“We hope that today, here, we have planted a tree of knowledge that will grow into a giant that takes South Sudan up into the knowledge skies and make it compete with the best of the best globally,” Khumbulani said. “We hope that these children will inspire other children of their generation in other schools and around the community to dream big and live their imaginations.”