The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme is set to be decentralised before the end of this year, The Sunday Times has learnt.In an interview with this newspaper last Friday, Jean Paul Hitimana, in charge of Training and Awareness at OLPC, said the project will be more productive, once it is decentralised.“We have been executing the project’s daily activities at the national level but under the decentralisation arrangement, it will be done at the district level and this is in line with the government’s efforts to extend services closer to beneficiaries,” explained Hitimana.Hitimana added that his institution was currently working with technical colleges to train their students in computer skills, saying it would enable them to become competent and effective in ICT.According to Hitimana, his institution has a technical team in charge of supervising how the whole programme works, but noted that they would recruit more staff to make the decentralisation process work smoothly.The project was launched in 2008 by President Paul Kagame, and according to Hitimana, they have so far distributed over 120,000 laptops to 224 schools countrywide, adding that the distribution process was continuous.
