Our surplus IT equipment found a new home with local charity IT Schools Africa.
Based here in Cheltenham, the charity collects and refurbishes IT equipment before sending it to partner charities in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi to be distributed to schools at a low cost.
And it’s not just the African schools who benefit. The UK programme of upgrading, testing and refurbishment of equipment also provides valuable experience and opportunities to the volunteers involved, offering pathways into training and employment for 120+ volunteers from various backgrounds each year.
The equipment we donated included PCs, laptops, and monitors, as well as a selection of keyboards, mice, cables and hard disk drives. These items would otherwise have been sent for recycling, so we're pleased that they’re able to be reused instead to benefit children’s IT education.
Following refurbishment, the charity aims for each machine sent to African schools to have a life of around 5-6 years, after which there is a recycling programme available to safely dispose of them.
Since 2004, the charity has given IT access to over 3 million children in Africa and provided training to over 1,000 UK-based volunteers, with over 80,000 computers having been collected in the UK.
We’d like to encourage other local businesses and residents to consider donating surplus IT equipment to IT Schools Africa as an alternative to recycling – visit their website below for more details of how you can support them.
