Liquid Intelligent Technologies and UNICEF have announced a collaboration to support Gigaâs work, an initiative launched by UNICEF and ITU in September 2019 to connect every school to the Internet and give every young person access to information, opportunity, and choice.
Liquid will share anonymized data to support Gigaâs work to map the location and connectivity status of schools in Africa and information about schoolsâ proximity to telecoms infrastructure and will help develop a connectivity monitoring platform. The resulting information will provide a basis for better-targeted investment to connect schools, including in hard-to-reach areas. The partnership will initially focus on Kenya but will aim to incorporate other Liquid markets over time, including South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Rwanda.
âThis partnership with Liquid will allow our Giga team to gain a deeper understanding of the connectivity landscape in Kenya and across Africa,â said Thomas Davin, Director, Office of Innovation at UNICEF. âThat knowledge will help UNICEF to get more schools online, giving children access to the opportunities they need to flourish.â
Ben Roberts, Group Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Liquid Intelligent Technologies, said, âThe Giga Initiative from UNICEF and ITU echoes Liquidâs sentiment of creating a digitally resilient economy in Kenya and Africa at large. There is no better place to start than our schools that shape the minds of our children, thereby securing our future. Through our expertise in the digital and telecom landscape, we will support UNICEF in its endeavor to map school connectivity data across Kenya by providing real-time figures to measure impact. This initiative also reiterates the vision of our parent company – Cassava Technologies, of creating a digitally connected continent that leaves no African behind.â
Giga accelerated its key focus in 2020 when COVID-19 hit and was able to support the immediate response to the pandemic and is as well looking at how connectivity can create stronger infrastructures of hope and opportunity in the post-COVID. It is the part of UNICEFâs broader Reimagine Education initiative, the UN Secretary General’s Common Agenda and Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, and ITU’s Partner2 Connect Coalition with a great potential to transform efforts to narrow the digital divide, provide a connectivity layer on which digital empowerment initiatives can be built on.
Giga has already mapped over 1 million schools and their connectivity around the world and has connected over 3,000 of them. Liquid, on the other hand, has connected 4,000 schools to the internet across Africa and has mapped 150,000 schools through the continent that it hopes to connect.
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