Kenya’s education sector is set for a transformation with Google’s announcement of gfunze. gfunze is a partnership between Google and various Kenya government agencies including the Ministries of Education, Ministry of Information and Communication, the Teachers Service Commission, Kenya ICT Board and Vision 2030 secretariat. The project was launched last Friday at the Kenyatta International Conference Center in Nairobi during a whole day conference targeting teachers from Nairobi and its environs. “gfunze aims to bring technology to teaching while Google aims at increasing its user base in Africa through the use of their products,” says Farzana Khubchandani, Google’s country marketing manager in Kenya. gfunze is a pilot project that sees Google make a foray into the secondary education space, having targeted universities in the past. Applications that are part of gfunze include Google Search, Google Earth and Google Apps - a document processing suite.The project is modeled around Google’s three pillar strategy - sustainability, relevance and accessibility of information. Farzana says that Google would use the pilot to collect feedback which would then determine when and how the project would be replicated elsewhere.

The more than 500 teachers were taken through ways they can enhance learning through the use of ICT. Participants would then form Google groups after the training on the tools. The groups would then be used for further collaboration.
The use of ICT is also parts of Kenya Vision 2030 hence the involvement of the secretariat. “We will need first world teachers and innovative (learning) institutions,” says Mugo Kibati, director general vision delivery secretariat of Vision 2030. Mugo also listed power stability in the country as a challenge to the ICT sector and overall country growth.
Professor George I. Godia, Education Secretary at Ministry of Education also announced various other measures that the ministry was undertaking in ICT. These include the launch of a National ICT Innovation and Integration Centre at the former Kenya Science Teachers College location. Funded by the Flemish Association for Development Cooperation and Technical Assistance (VVOB), the center aims to be a test bed for new ICT technologies and how they can be integrated into learning.
Also in the making is a national education portal which is a digital content platform for development and sharing of education by teachers. Godia also said that the government had scrapped a plan to supply 300 computers to educational institutions in all constituencies. This has instead been replaced with a new initiative that established 5 model schools in all constituencies that were each supplied with 11 computers, 1 LCD projector, 1 printer, a local area network, a laptop and one year Internet connection. The Secretary says that the money has already been disbursed to schools, and that the project would be replicated to cover all schools in the country.
“We need to transform ICT as a teaching tool that helps teachers to facilitate teaching and learners to understand,” said Godia.