The Afghan School Project

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Information Technology Courses for Afghan Government Officials

Program Description

The Afghan-Canadian Community Center is seeking funding to provide training programs to government employees who use computers at government institutions in Kandahar. The program’s goal is to teach Afghan government staff successful and effective management skills. The employees will be trained by IT experts hired for the courses by the Afghan-Canadian Community Center.

The proposed training period is four months per course. It is our goal to run three training cycles during the twelve month period, once funding has been received.

Implementation

This program will provide computer literacy training to 40 trainees in Kandahar. Fifty percent of the students will be women. The trainees will be selected among candidates submitted by Provincial Government offices and local representatives of Government of Afghanistan (GoA) ministries and other stakeholders of the Afghan-Canadian Community Center.

Course Description

This course will introduce the use of Information and Communication Technologies in government institutions within fast changing IT environment. The employees will receive practical instruction in the use of MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Outlook).

They will also receive introductory and ‘on the job’ training in the operating system and its applications in a wireless network environment, which will help them to understand and use a computer effectively. Furthermore, they will have the chance to experience the different applications and usage of the Internet (Web browsing, HTML, FTP, blogs, e-mail, Macromedia Flash, Chat, VOIP) and will use these applications to reach their objectives in this and other courses.

From the very beginning, the students will work with virtual tools (Intranets, WebCast, Instant Messenger, Webmail), which will allow them to stay in contact with the lecturers at all times and prepare them for today’s work environment. These systems will be provided by the teachers. Whenever possible, the instructors will try to include other topics and integrate the newly learned techniques and their applications to other subjects.

Course Goals

Upon completion of the course, the employees will be expected to:

1. Understand the different software and hardware components of today’s ICT institutional & business environments.

2. Be able to create professional presentations, documents, reports, charts, calculations, simple desktop publishing and blogs using the appropriate software.

3. Analyse information and use the Internet for research and development purposes.

4. Understand how ICT can help today’s institutions and businesses support a global, virtual, immediate and knowledge-supporting work environment.

5. Feel comfortable and have fun with ICT!

Course Content

· Introduction to today’s role of Information and Communication Technologies within today’s institutional and economic environment.

· Setting up virtual work environment – Hotmail, MSN “buddies”, virtual office access, WebCast

· Microsoft Excel – Worksheet, calculations, and charts

· Microsoft PowerPoint – Presentations

· Microsoft Word – Word and Document processing

· Internet Explorer and its applications – Mail, search engines, HTML, WebBlog

· Collaboration tools – Web Collaborator, Skype, Webcast, Chat and others

· Chat and Instant Messenger

· WebCast with Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP)

Teaching and Learning Strategies

The entire course will be presented via lectures. The employees will be encouraged to participate in classroom training. The instructor will act as a guide to help the students acquire knowledge and experience through practical experience and by investigating the use of the latest ICT tools and applications. The emphasis is not on memorizing technical terms but rather on learning how to search and analyse information to achieve objectives in a professional manner. There will be used real-life examples and the latest Internet tools available to prepare the employees for their future virtual, digital, immediate, knowledge-based, and innovative working environment.

Unique Features of this Training

By streamlining communications between the provincial government and its departments with the central government, this program directly promotes the institutional development and capacity-building of the public sector. It will also contribute to a qualitative improvement in the administrative services offered at the provincial level, which in turn, will enhance local governance and the expansion and promotion of legal economic activities.

Although this program’s contribution to business development seems modest in the short term, it will be vast in the mid and long term due to the impact it will have on the promotion of new businesses and entrepreneurial opportunities at the regional level. It is also gender sensitive and will open new windows of opportunities for women in the region.

A strong, efficient, qualified and motivated public administration is an asset for the Afghan Canadian Community Center’s activities in Kandahar. This type of training will have a significant contribution to the development of human capital at the regional level. The emphasis of the Government Institutional Capacity Building Program on capacity-building activities will help improve the legal and regulatory governance at the provincial level.

Program Requirements

2 trainers (1 male and 1 female teacher)

Monthly salary: US$ 300.00 each for a total of US$2,400.00 per course.

Total cost of this Donor Request is US$600.00 a month, for a total of US$2,400.00 for a four month course.