Help fund a solar-powered Raspberry Pi school

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Eben Upton was inspired to create his bare-bones credit-card sized computer after noticing a decline in the number of children learning to code. He wanted to create a cheap computer designed to be programmed, much like the BBC Micro, which was hugely popular in UK schools back in the 1980s.

Although the Raspberry Pi has since found a massive audience outside of schools, it’s still an educational tool at heart, and its low cost and energy efficiency make it ideal for introducing computers into rural schools in developing nations.

A new Indiegogo fundraiser has just launched which is aiming to fund a Raspberry Pi computer lab for a school in Cosmo City, a thriving suburb north of Johannesburg in South Africa. The people behind the project, United Twenty-13, a South African non-profit organization, are seeking $10,500 in funding (they are currently a tenth of the way there) to equip the building they already have with Raspberry Pi computers, monitors, keyboards, mice and additional hardware.

If they can raise another $12,000 on top of that, they will be able to power the lab using solar energy.

It’s a great idea, and a worthy cause. 77 percent of schools in South Africa don’t have any computers and 40 percent don’t even have access to electricity, so projects like this can really make a difference.

If the venture is successful, United Twenty-13 is hoping to reproduce labs like this all over South Africa.

You can donate to the cause here, and find out more about the project at www.solarpoweredlearning.com. Sharing awareness of the project will help too.