Once a year, DTU sends a container with old IT equipment to Eritrea, where it is given a new lease of life. Behind the idea is Systems Engineer Sahle Berhane from IT Service at DTU.
Systems Engineer Sahle Berhane fills the container with DTU’s discarded computers, keyboards, telephones, screens, computer mouses, network equipment and servers. But instead of driving the container to the waste dump, he ensures that it is shipped to Eritrea, where the fully functional computers and IT equipment gain a new lease of life.
This is the seventh container, Sahle Berhane from the IT Service department, AIT, has filled since 2005. And in Eritrea, schoolchildren, teachers and health personnel in six provinces have benefited from the equipment in schools, libraries and hospitals.
Interactive education
IT is crucial to development in Eritrea. IT helps teachers to manage school timetables, environmental plans and teach pupils using interactive textbooks, empowering them to influence the teaching process. That was an opportunity denied to me as a child,” explains Sahle Berhane.
He came to Denmark in 1983 as an Eritrean refugee, going on to graduate as an MSc in Engineering at DTU. In 2004, he took up a position with IT Service at DTU, where he became aware of the IT equipment in the basement awaiting destruction. It was at that moment the idea of reusing the IT equipment came to him.
As a member of the Danish-Eritrean network Azmara.dk, he and chairman Michael Dorph Jensen entered into an agreement with DTU to send the used computers to Eritrea.
Valuable for society
Sahle Berhane is no longer alone in cleaning computers of data and readying them for shipment, ably assisted by his colleagues in IT Service at DTU. And their efforts are paying off. In autumn 2013, DTU received a visit from the partners who receive the computers in Eritrea. They spoke of the joy that the old computers are bringing to the children in Eritrea, explains Sahle Berhane:
“In the old days, as many as 1,000 children could fight over 100 books in the library. If you were lucky, you got to borrow a book every three months. Now you can turn on a computer and read the book on a CD-ROM. The computer equipment has proved invaluable for the children and society as a whole.”
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Schoolchildren in Eritrea benefit from IT equipment
that would otherwise have been scrapped.
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The network Azmara.dk
The Danish-Eritrean network Azmara.dk works closely with Danida, which finances Recycling for South (Genbrug til Syd), which is managed by Danish Mission Council Development Department.
Azmara.dk’s partner in Eritrea—Library and Information Association of Eritrea (LIAE)—works in partnership with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in Eritrea’s Ministry of Education, which receives the equipment and distributes it to the education and library sector.
When its service life is over, the equipment is destroyed in an environmentally friendly and secure manner.
Read more at Azmara.dk