Make your school a digital hub, CS Owalo

Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communication and Digitial Economy, Eliud Owalo, has challenged schools’ old boys and girls associations, across the country, to contribute to the expansion of national digital access, by providing hotspots in their former schools.

Addressing a reception in his honour by his former Maseno National School colleagues, in Nairobi on Friday, the CS said that schools’ former students could come together to adopt not just in their schools, but even in their villages and communities where the schools are located.

"We are the people with the capacity and the knowledge,” he said.

"Let us not just be welfare groups, planning burials - important as that may be. Let us make our former schools and villages digital hubs."

Owalo said that with the proposed expansion of the national digital superhighway by 100,000 km of fibre optic over the next few years, the only barrier to access will be affordability.

"But while the government and its partners will work on the affordability of devices and laying out of the infrastructure, the educated class can also play a very crucial integral role, by adopting schools and villages. You can adapt your home village and make it a digital hotspot, as opposed to adopting a polling station for political purposes."

Kenya has an ambitious plan to expand the current digital fibre optic network by 100,000 km, over the next 10 years.

According to the Kenya Kwanza strategic agenda, called The PLAN, this will spur digital uptake and spark the transformation of the country into an empowered digital economy, through the creation of jobs and transactions of a business in various sectors on digital platforms.

 Owalo promised to lead by example, by working with his former schoolmates to make Maseno School a digital complex.

“I look forward to working in partnership with Maseno old boys, to realize our vision of an empowered and digitized Kenyan society," he said.