Students Ian Wrangham, Koojo Matthew and Rwabuhinga Francis, pictured below, are one of 15 college teams to win a $10,000 internship from the One Laptop Per Child foundation (OLPC, www.laptop.org) for summer 2009. Groups from 220 colleges competed for internships in countries around the world. The Wrangham-Koojo-Rwabuhinga group collectively represented Colorado College in the competition. Ian Wrangham attends Colorado College, Matthew Koojo attends Kampala International University in Kampala, Uganda, and Francis Rwabuhinga attends Makerere University, also in Kampala. Both Matthew and Francis are Kasiisi Project scholarship students.
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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation supplies third-world students with small, rugged, intuitively usable laptop computers to promote more rapid learning and assimilation into the interconnected world community. This year's summer internships in Africa are being organized and funded by the foundation's OLPCorps Africa Project. The Wrangham-Koojo-Rwabuhinga group - the "Kasiisi OLPC group" - will work with the Africa Project, the Kibale Forest Schools and Student Support Project based in Uganda, and with the Kasiisi Project, which is based in Massachusetts and Uganda. The latter two projects are both registered charity organizations in their respective countries.
The Kasiisi OLPC group will undergo orientation and training in Kigale, the capital city of Rwanda, during June 2009. First installations of 100 laptops at Kasiisi School are expected to start in August 2009. One of the group members will attend a summit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2009, to report on the project outcome. Professor Nicholas Negroponte of MIT founded the OLPC foundation, a registered non-profit organization, in 2005. He remains the foundation's chairman.