Shilpa Sayura pilot project has been completed successfully. With the demand from Nenasala communities, Shilpa Sayura requires further expansion deploying in over 380 Nenasala Tele Center Locations Island wide. With it’s first year success, Shilpa Sayura has a great potential to be developed as a National project for strengthening rural education to bridge the gap between rural and urban students.
Shilpa Sayura Technology and Cultural Festival at Kandiyapitawewa is a village community and ICT event planned to commemorate Shilpa Sayura success, to create a forum on community ICT and to seek funding assistance for expansion as a National Project. The event selected furthest Nenasala Village where Shilpa Sayura Project was Implemented successfully.
Kandiyapitawewa is a beautiful village, on the Bintenne plain of Monaragala District. Visitors can reach Kandiyapitawewa after 2 hours drive from Balangoda, Embilipitiya, Wellawaya or Thanamalwila. Kandiyapitawewa also a great eco location by Udawalawe National park. The event designed to place the Kandiyapitawewa village community in the focal point.
ICT Experts and Scholars, ICTA, University of Colombo, Sinhala Unicode Group, Agriculture Department, ICT Teachers and community ICT will be visiting Kandiyapitawewa during the Festival to share their knowledge with Village Community, Students and Teachers. Its also a learning opportunity for the ICT Experts and Policy Makers who are visiting Kandiyapitawewa.
The event has special sessions and forums to build community ICT awareness, ICT for Youth, ICT for Women, ICT for Farmers. Community Technology, Govt. Information for Public, Teaching School ICT and ICT for Employment. A meeting of Sinhala Unicode Group will be held to discuss future activities in community software development and localization issues. The sessions are conducted in local language enabling two way communication between ICT experts and villagers. The program would be broadcasted on
www.shilpasayura.org.
The specialty of this event is that, although being an ICT event, it has shifted the venue to a most remote village with least resources, it focuses on community development through ICT to empower the village. It’s also not very common that ICT experts from different themes to travel voluntarily to a remote location to share their knowledge with the village community.
In this aspect Shilpa Sayura has become a success story not only as good software and digital educational content , but it also has started building an ICT community network bridging rural communities ICT experts through participative development to empower the village using ICT. Recap: Shilpa Sayura is an ICTA e-Society Funded Pilot Project Initiated by E fusion pvt ltd (
www.sinharaja.com).
Recap :
The objective of the Shilpa Sayura was to create digital educational content system in Sinhala Language to enable self studying of 8 subjects for grades 6-11 O/L. Shilpa Sayura provides an interactive means of self study and a teaching resource to students in remote communities, who do not have access to urban educational resources. Shilpa Sayura is now operates in 20 Nenasala Communities with the objective of developing self learning capacity of remote, rural students.
