Low-cost computing gets professional for Afghan school

gallery

One student, Suhila, said: "I am not frightened... but the environment makes us worry about certain hazardous events that are going to happen to us today or tomorrow, such us kidnapping, gunfire, being threatened and so on..."

The threats are not just against the students, Ullah said: "I am under continuous death threats. I have been warned to stop teaching women. Friends have been telling me that I must quit teaching and operating schools."

Despite the risks, the brave and progressive come to the centre to get an education and work. And pushing on - despite the challenges - is necessary. As is the norm in the developed world, getting a job in government or business requires IT skills, Ullah added.

Due to this, business-ready computers with internet access are essential to the school, even for classes outside of the IT remit, as paper textbooks are hard to come by and costly. Indeed, web-capable computers allow flexibility for the course curriculum - key to letting the ACCC respond to the needs of local employers and ensure the students get jobs.

The IT setup

The IT setup in the school is simple, as it must be. The ACCC has 27 computers currently functioning across three labs. There are three printers, but they've mostly run out of ink. Everything is powered by a generator, as the local grid isn't stable enough. "Using a heavy duty generator we have no problem with powering the computers, except the increased fuel cost and generator maintenance cost," said Ullah. He is looking to improve the school's energy efficiency, including by switching out old monitors with LCD ones.

Accessing the internet has been frustrating. The connection the school has is good enough for about eight computers, but has been split between 12. Students have to wait minutes for each page to load.

Two of the three computer labs are used for training - be it accessing the online business management programmes from a Canadian college, the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) or doing research online. The third lab is a free internet café for local women, who use it to check their email, chat and yes, even Facebook. The computers are installed with Windows applications, including Office, and are also used to teach networking and graphic design.

Thanks to Ullah's good reputation in the community and the success former students from the school have had finding jobs, students far outnumber computers - the school has even started teaching men to meet demand for well-trained government employees. But purchasing new desktops is expensive and shipping them even more so. Indeed, the Afghan School Project declines offers of used Western computers because the cost of shipping outweighs the worth of the computer.

So the school faces a problem. It can't afford stacks of new computers nor the energy to run them, but it desperately needs to expand the programme.

The NComputing trial

Such challenges have had a surprisingly cutting-edge solution. Over the summer, a firm called NComputing started hawking their wares in the UK. The education-focused devices split out the CPUs from a single desktop machine to as many as 30 additional workstations or set up workstations based on a server - think low-cost thin client computing.

Email to a friend

Print this page