Kigali, 31 August 2011
President Kagame, today in his office at Urugwiro Village, received the CEO and Chairman of the One Laptop Per Child Project, Rodrigo Arboleda. Mr.Arboleda has been in the country to assess progress of the project. He was accompanied to the meeting by Sergio Romero,Vice-President of OLPC in charge of Africa.
Speaking to the press after meeting President Kagame, Mr. Arboleda said that he visited the President to thank him for the deployment of modern technology in education and for his leadership role in promoting One Laptop Per Child Program in Rwanda and Africa.
He said: “I came here to pay tribute to what Rwandans have achieved under President Kagame, after going through very difficult times. Rwandans have shown that they are interested in the future more than the past and this is an opportunity you should not lose.”
The CEO also discussed with the President additional opportunities for cooperation that would keep Rwanda in the leadership role in the program, including positioning Rwanda as a consulting point for the program, as a nation that adopted the One Laptop Per Child program in its nascent stages. Rwanda intends to set up a laptop assembly plant that will serve the whole of Africa and create a global awareness campaign to share the success in Rwanda so as to become a global deployment model.
The Minister of state for Education, Dr. Mathias Harebamungu said: “This guest was here to assure the President and the Rwandan people of the partnership of the OLPC program and also deliver a message from Professor Negroponte to the President. He has been around the country and has witnessed the progress we have made in the deployment of laptops. We are now embarking on distributing servers, which will make things easier for pupils and their teachers to download educational content. We want to be the center of excellence for this project in Africa.”