By Annastasia Shipepe & Nicola J Bidwell, University of Namibia 22 November 2016, First Summit on Community Networks in Africa, Nairobi, Kenya

1. Connecting Eenhana: Supporting ICT
Skill Development in Community
Network Projects
Annastasia Shipepe & Nicola J Bidwell
University of Namibia

2. What is Connecting Eenhana?
• Collaboration between:
– Staff and students in from
University of Namibia’s
(UNAM) School of Computing
– Glowdom Educational
Foundation
– Eenhana community
members
UNAM,
Windhoek
Eenhana
• Small grant from The Open Technology Institute mid 2015 to establish a
community network in Eenhana, far north Namibia
• Aims:
– To support developing a community network for local information sharing
– To provide opportunities for university students to share/apply their creative and
problem solving skills in real life contexts

3. People
• UNAM
– Lecturers:
• Gabriel Nhinda, Anna Shipepe,
Anton Limbo, Nic Bidwell
– 3rd/4th year computing student
interns:
• Manfred TK Takondwa, Shetu
Sheetekela
– 3rd year HCI students
• University of Western Cape
– Post-doc: Carlos Rey-Moreno
• Glowdom Educational Foundation
– Sebulon David
– Yuri Peter
– Youngsters

4. Original Aims
• Wi-fi mesh network to enable sharing information that local people cannot access
– e.g. documents about health, education and local government and content
created by local people
• Nodes at
– Community Radio Station
– Schools, including a special school for
the Deaf
– TIT Institute of Technology
– Multi-purpose centre
– Eenhana’s watertower, providing wide
coverage
– San community
• A small digital noticeboard in
Eenhana Town Council displays
updates about documents
• Community members can
download content, for free, onto
their mobile phones or tablets, or
using a computer at GEF

5. Teaching New Skills to Local People
• Content Generation
– Digital Storytelling workshops with High school
youth
• Workshops and practical
experiences on: networks,
web development,
Raspberry pi
• 15 participants
– 19 – 27 years
– 7 women, 8 men
– From the Vocational
Training College, Eenhana
Youth Group, Town
Council, Ohangwena
Community Radio

6. Network Workshops & Practicals
• Shetu and Gabriel taught:
– In Oshiwambo
– The difference between wired
and wireless communications and
their cabling structures
– Using point-to-point networks for
sharing files
• Shared music files between
computers over Ethernet
Cables
• TK
– Network cables cable making
• One young woman took charge and showed the young men how to make
the cables properly …..
– Testing nodes

7. Web Development Workshop
• Basic html
• Participants developed
simple web pages

8. Raspberry Pi Workshop
• Raspberry Pi
(donated by PyCon
Namibia) to host
website

9. Website User Testing
• We asked participants to
test the website on
format, content etc

10. Tangi unene