UN gives technological boost to 500,000 Albanian school students

Almost half a million Albanian students now have access to modern computer laboratories, high-speed Internet and training in information technology skills thanks to a new United Nations-backed initiative aiming to improve their employment prospects.

As a result of the “e-School” programme, some 379 high schools and 800 elementary schools across Albania have been equipped with up-to-date computer technology, benefiting some 450,000 students and 25,000 teachers.

“For us in the Western Balkans ICT or information technologies is a major cornerstone of our activities, particularly with a view to the European Union accession of these countries,” Moises Venancio, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) Senior Programme Manager and Team Leader for the Western Balkans told the UN News Centre today.

Mr. Venancio underscored the importance of the programme “in terms of helping to train the future generation of Europeans who will have to compete in a far different and far more complicated labour environment than their parents will have done.”

Leonik Tomeo Secondary School, with more than 950 students and teachers, is using the tools to produce a school newspaper while, as one student put it, joining the rest of the world’s teenagers on the Internet.

Before the “e-schools” project was launched in 2005, the situation in many schools was “very primitive, in some cases perhaps one computer for all the kids in the school,” said Mr. Venancio.

“Some of these schools are really in rural areas that are very deprived of anything, in particular any access to any type of new information,” he added. “So this has really enabled kids who live in very poor marginalized rural areas to benefit from the advances of having online access to information and what’s going on in the world.”

The initiative was financed with a $25 million loan from the World Bank and support from a number of private and public donors, including Western Union Corporation, the Albanian Banking Association and UFO, a private university.