UPDATE: Radio Education Tutoring Program

The Village Link has been raising funds over the past few months to help cover the cost of implementing a support program for the Ministry of Education's radio education program. Recently, we traveled to Golu to meet with the committee members to explain our plans and to get their feedback. Our plan is to provide and distribute radios and school supplies to students in the village. This plan was positively received. We will also be looking to hire local teachers to tutor and keep track of the student's homework assignments. The resource center will be used as a meeting point for students and teachers to meet one on one to go over the class material and homework. Below are some pictures from our latest meetings in Golu. If you are interested in contributing to this program or other similar programs you can do so by visiting our donation page.

TVL Meeting in Bundobu: Looking Towards The Future

This week TVL had a meeting in Bundobu to discuss future plan's for Golu and TVL. Our resource center volunteer in Golu, John Try met up with Mike O'Neill, Director, Global Safety and Security for Save The Children and long time Golu resident and friend of TVL's founder, Mr. Fillie.

Currently Mike is busy in Sierra Leone helping to set up an Ebola Hospital for the rest of the month. During his off time, he was able to meet with us to help strategize current and future opportunities for Golu and TVL.

TVL is currently working on raising funds to purchase and distribute radio's to families in Golu with school aged children so they can take part in the Ministry of Education's radio education program. This is a very affordable program and will provide the opportunity for children to catch up on their studies since schools are closed due to the Ebola crisis. You can make a contribution to this program here. Just $25 will get 1 radio and 2 batteries for a family in Golu.

Below are some more photo's from the meeting.

TVL Co-Director's Innovative Software Helps Sierra Leone In Fight Against Ebola

The Village Link's Co-Director, Evelyn Lewis is a very busy man. When he's not helping TVL, he is working for his other company, SBTS Group - an ICT consulting firm and TrainingSol - a training company and jobs portal. Most recently Evelyn has poured his time, money and resources into helping Sierra Leone fight the Ebola crisis in a more organized way despite the fact that his own business is suffering due to this crisis. He decided he needed to help because he could. Evelyn is just one of many Sierra Leonian entrepreneurs that have seen a major loss in revenue due to Ebola.

After he visited the EOC (Emergency Operations Center), the central coordination center all the agencies giving support, he immediately saw they were in need of help. What he saw was quite alarming given the magnitude of the crisis. There was only one lady, tasked with the job of answering phones and responsible for reporting all ebola cases in the country. This is when he knew that if Sierra Leone was going to battle this virus and have a shot at defeating it, they would have to more organized and better prepared to handle the workload.

Immediately, Evelyn got all of his staff started on writing a new software to coordinate the Ebola effort for the call center  and to make sure it was tailored specific to this effort. The new software is appropriately named the Ebola Operating System (EOS).

As Evelyn describes, "the need for the software was noted as the significant increase in calls contained sensitive operational and time-bound information required by the numerous ebola response teams and to primarily make sure all cases and calls were logged at the initial point of contact coming through the main telephone number 117 and centralize data gathering and sharing." The EOC call center was able to expand it's call center resources from only 16 lines to 62 lines with this new software.

Previously, call agents would handwrite the initial recordings at the beginning of the operations, then enter this data into separate excel spreadsheets causing a backlog of manual entry and delays in reaching out to the respective teams and susceptible to mistakes. This new software provides unified data in a centralized system based on the feedback of field teams.

In addition to building out a customized software, free of charge for all NGO's and the EOC to use, Evelyn and his team were able to provide training for the Ebola efforts and actually hired and trained all 200 employees for the call center, provided credential services for the quarantined areas and vehicle passes etc., to cover about 50,000 persons.  Evelyn and his team also donated short term support completely free to the people of Sierra Leone to help fight this crisis.

It's still an uphill battle they are fight in Sierra Leone but at least they are more organized and able to respond in a more timely manner, thanks to Evelyn and his teams timely response and generous donation. We're so proud of the work he is providing his country!

Reading In The Mobile Era

This is why we are striving to provide modern and innovative solutions to the community resource center's we build. We understand that with modern technology we are able to reach more people and help in the areas of education and literacy. As previously mentioned in one of our other blog posts our goal with #ProjectGolu is to finalize the project with the installation of a digital library that will provide local and global content, among other learning materials on both tablets and solar powered desktop computers.

by BenStanford.

Village Link Project Update

Last week was a busy week for TVL. We had a number of meetings on the East Coast in NY and Washington D.C., all to help us reach our mission. Part of our mission is to work with community entrepreneurs and other organizations to encourage economic growth. Our first meeting of the week was with an interesting nonprofit called Sustainable Travel International that aims to "help communities, businesses and governments build a better future for themselves and their environments through travel and tourism". When we first heard about Sustainable Travel we knew we needed to talk to them to see if there would be any interest in adding Sierra Leone as a destination. Not only do we love what they are doing, we think Salone is a great destination. The country has beautiful beaches, charming villages and markets and a fun and exciting nightlife in the cities. A little bit for everyone! Sierra Leone has a lot to offer the adventurous traveller. In addition to spreading the word that this country is a hidden gem to visit, this could be an opportunity for Golu and its residents to provide goods and services for its visitors, all the while improving their economy. We've just begun the talks but our ambitious goal is to get to Salone before the end of the year to host Sustainable Travel and prove to them that Salone is a destination worthy to add to their list! Travel contingent on the Ebola situation and travel restrictions. 

Our second meeting of the week was really exciting for TVL! We've already shared with you that we are looking into bringing a digital library solution to Golu that would operate on a solar powered server intranet system that would be up to date with both local and global content ranging from Khan Academy to primary learning modules to Sierra Leonean School Syllabus content. The company that we have been vetting out is Lam-Tech, a local Sierra Leone tech consulting business with a nonprofit foundation to help schools and nonprofits like TVL provide an innovative approach to learning. For us, this was an exciting and successful meeting because it gave us a chance to learn that Lam-Tech and TVL share the same passion to help facilitate continued learning opportunities. Lam-tech is as passionate about this as we are. This week our Director, Ibrahim, was scheduled to meet with Lam-tech team members in Freetown to discuss how to adapt their product to Golu's environment. More to come on this as things progress.

Another interesting potential project that came out of this meeting was the initial discussion of TVL helping to facilitate the development of a small manufacturing facility, possibly in Golu, for Lam-Tech hardware. Again, the interest that TVL has in this is to be the conduit between Lam-Tech and the people of Golu to encourage entrepreneurship, job creation and economic development. More to come on this later too.

Our last meeting of the trip was with one of our board members, Michael McGirr and a fellow past Peace Corp volunteer, Don Wilson. The three of us volunteered in Golu during the 70's together. This was a strategic planning meeting to start discussions on where to take TVL in the future.

All in all, it was a successful week with good developments but still a lot of work to do!