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Rotarian Hopes To Revolutionize Education In Rural Kenya With 'Rachel' and 'Raspberry Pi'

This article is more than 9 years old.

This week, I am in Ethiopia on a service expedition with Rotary International to support a National Immunization Day for Polio. While here, I encountered an unanticipated social enterprise.

Bob Cairns, one of the Rotarians on the trip, is a retired civilian employee of the U.S. Navy who previously served in the Air Force; he worked managing the Navy’s largest fuel depot. He is distinctly not an entrepreneur nor tech savvy. He should be cruising with his wife of 40+ years, Christine. But he’s not. I’ll tell you why.

Bob has a plan to revolutionize education in Kenya and across Sub-Saharan Africa with a gadget called a Raspberry Pi developed in the UK by a team from Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. The gadget is a tiny, radically affordable computer. It costs just $38.41 on Amazon.com. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a nonprofit based on the UK.

Working with Spencer Foxworth, who does know something about computers, Bob and Spencer followed instructions from the nonprofit WorldPossible to equip the tiny device with a wifi antennae and a 32 gig SD card onto which they have downloaded an educational database called Rachel, produced by World Possible. The database includes 6,000 curated Wikipedia articles, thousands of Khan Academy videos, a deep database of health and wellness content, thousands of K-12 text books (most including teacher editions), world literature, and a variety of other educational content.

Because Bob intends to deploy the devices in places in Kenya where power is unreliable or unavailable, he powers the Pi with a battery mounted to a small solar panel.

Of course, students don’t have laptops or iPads with which to access the Pi or its vast database, so Bob has sourced six-inch Android tablets for about $42 (Bob says they can get the cost down to about $37 when they start buying tablets by the hundreds). Each Pi can support up to ten simultaneous users.

Bob is rolling out a pilot program to nine schools in Kenya in three phases. Phase one is now complete. All nine schools have one Raspberry Pi and one tablet with the solar powered battery, allowing teachers to begin developing lessons using the Rachel database. Phase one was funded personally; Bob has covered his own travel to spend a month in Africa (after spending ten days with his wife and granddaughter, Ashley Carter, in Kenya he’s joined the Rotary team here in Addis Ababa to do polio immunizations, after which he’ll move on to Uganda for more service). Marybeth Foxworth, Spencer’s mother, purchased all of the hardware for the first phase of the project.

Phase II will be to provide the nine schools with additional tablets so that students can begin accessing the database. This $7,000 effort will be funded 50 percent by Bob’s own Port Orchard Washington Rotary Club with the balance coming from his Rotary District.

Phase III will be to provide each school with more Raspberry Pi units and more tablets so that each school will have three Raspberry Pi units and 30 student tablets plus a teacher tablet. This final phase is part of a larger effort that Bob is leading to do some significant work in Kenya, including a major water project and scholarships for high school students in Kenya. The total budget of nearly $125,000 is funded by Rotary, with money coming from local clubs in Washington, the Rotary District and the Rotary Foundation at Rotary International.

On the ground in Kenya, Bob is partnering with a local nonprofit called Hifadhi Africa to provide support to the schools as they work to implement the technology into their curriculum and practice.

Bob is soft-spoken, unassuming and yet remarkably passionate about his work in Africa, especially the Raspberry Pi and Rachel program, which will put computers and vast amounts of educational material in the hands of kids who have don’t even have current text books today.

Bob’s uncommon passion didn’t spring from nothing. In 2004, Bob was serving as the Scholarship Chair for his local Rotary Club and met a young refugee from Rwanda named John. Fleeing the genocide, at age seven, John had become responsible for his two younger brothers ages four and six months. Over the years since, Bob’s life has slowly been moving into an African orbit, drawn by the three young men whom he has helped over the years. The middle brother, Nsengimana Jovenal, is one of the three founders of Hifadhi Africa, providing support for the implementation of the Raspberry Pi/Rachel program.

Having seen the struggles of these three young men and the challenges facing so many in Africa, Bob now finds himself working with unquenchable fire to help eradicate poverty there.