Who are you trying to help? What issue are you trying to address?

We are helping the marginalized youths – the school dropouts, the homeless, the jobless, youths with no formal skills and youths from low income families in rural areas.

In most sphere’s of life like education, employment, etc., the rural marginalized youths are the most affected. In schools they underperform compared to their counterparts from well to do family or from urban schools. The number of school dropouts is higher in rural areas than in other places.

Poverty is high and rampant in rural areas, this affect the youths especially in education and employment. Youths from poverty stricken families find it hard to find a job either because they are not educated or have no skills.

Wairaka lacks vocational institution to cater for the poverty stricken and marginalized youths.

We addressed the issue of lack of vocational institution by setting up an Information Communication Centre (ICT) to work as a pivotal point for the youths in Wairaka.

We addressed the poverty issue by providing a Diploma in Mobile Phone Software Development course to teach the youths in skills that are in high demand and link them to jobs of the future.

When youths are educated, skilled and have jobs they help their communities to thrive and thereby reduce poverty.

What is your project and how will it help?

MCITEDI is a Non-Government Organization based in Wairaka – Jinja District (Uganda – E. Africa). We work towards eliminating poverty from the marginalized youths by providing education resources and training in Mobile Phone Software Development.
Equipping young people from rural areas with education of the 21st Century gives them an edge in the job search. Our courses are geared towards e-Commerce and Mobile for Development.

The mobile phone is one of the tools that is empowering African people today in communication, commerce, trade, development, education etc. In Uganda, there are over 10 Million mobile users, but there are shortage of app developers, programmers, and people who can penetrate this vast untapped market.

Teaching the marginalized youths in Software development, programming, entreprenureship and idea generation will bring a new bread of App developers, computer programmers, web designers, e-commerce system developers or some youths may decide to become tech entrepreneurs.

Not only we give a chance to our young stars to learn new skills, but we also help them to find jobs or set up their own enterprises. We teach the youth the importance of community development by teaching students about real life projects in class and students do assignments based on local problems. We ask students to use technology to solve these problems.

This way not only the youths are empowered with new skills, and jobs, but they as well help their communities to develop.

How can other people partner with you on your project?

Organisations that want MCITEDI to provide Mobile Software Development Courses. We run a 6 month course combining computer programming, Mobile Phone Software Development, entrepreneurship and idea generation.

We can as well provide short courses like a weekend boot camp in apps design.

When Partnering with organizations that are not in our location, we teach through Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), meaning we teach from a distant location using live video streams like Google+, Skype etc.

Partnering with organizations that want to fund our noble cause.

Please detail the resources that you need.

We mainly need laptops, we have a few laptops that we use and some of the students have to share a laptop. Being we are a new organization, we have many challenges, we welcome any kind contribution in any form or way both material or financial.