Satellite Way for Education - 13 satcom-enabled schools in rural areas

Satellite Way for Education 2 (SWAY4Edu2) aims to realize an additional cluster (as compared to SWAY4EDU project) of 12 satcom-enabled schools in the rural area of Mpumalanga in South Africa and 1 school (3 classes, about 75 students) in a rural area of the Basilicata Region (Italy) for the development of competences in IT and in the preservation of the natural environment. The main objectives are to assist rural children and teachers to be more tech savvy and become aware of the benefits that information and communication technologies bring with them, to develop awareness amongst local youth, as well as amongst the wider community members, of the importance of preserving their local wildlife heritage, to implement and validate a set of pilot edutainment services (e.g. small digital cinema in the classrooms, radio channels) and to foster awareness and facilitate the utilization of the system by the local communities. The project has created “twinning” activities between the South African schools and the Italian school to exchange educational, cultural and linguistic experiences and developed a partnership with the European and South African industry to establish a scalable and sustainable service to meet the above objectives on a wider deployment scale. The project will further realize an additional cluster of 20 satcom-enabled radio stations in the rural area of the Democratic Republic of Congo in order to expand the current network of rural radio stations deployed in Sway4edu with an additional 20 pilot sites to promote the “cloud” service. This will allow radio stations to generate their own radio programmes and to share them online with the other radios, enabling collaborative post-production of the content before final FM broadcasting to the local communities.