John spent the morning installing the new eGranary (a digital library) at a vocational training center. The photograph shows members of the staff at Apurimac Onlus Vocational center celebrating the installation of the eGranary. The center provides a variety of programs including computer skills. The computer training graduates 100 students every 6 months and includes male and female students from a broad range of ages and religious backgrounds. The computer program has a waiting list of several hundred students and will now have capacity for 32 additional students per semester as well a providing access to all students to a much broader educational experience.
Faculty were already researching agricultural information on the eGranary for a project in a remote villageThis is exactly the kind of situation for which the eGranary was designed- to enable access to resources otherwise unavailable.
The eGranary was designed by WiderNet founder, Cliff Missen, who worked with faculty at the University of Jos. It is comprised of 20 million documents including 30,000 books and over 30,000 webpages with educational and encyclopedic materials. It changes an educational environment with no textbooks and computers with no internet access, into an environment of exploration and research opportunities.