Thursday, March 4, 2010

Active Community Participation is crucial on ICT4D project - A Success story from Baddegama



My memories go to dusty, harsh & arid environment with Silindu, Punchi Menika, Hinnihamy & Babun. “Village in the Jungle” or “Baddegama” is a well-known novel written by Leonard Woolf. Today, I can see only the big tamarind tree as mention in the novel. The environment is still arid. But the infrastructures have been developed. Instead of foot paths, new tar roads have been built, schools, irrigation cannels, new buildings, information infrastructure, are the symbols of new development which is being witnessed by tamarind tree over two hundred years. Today this area is called as Migahajandura.

His name is Pushpakumara Munasinghe, 38 years old, live in Migahajandura. He started his learning journey from Sooriyawewa National Schools, and graduated in Human Resource Management from University of Jayawardanapura. This story is a good illustration to prove the community involvement in ICT for Development.


Pushpakumara had to sit for several governments’ competitive exams to find the best fit in job for him. Every time he sat for exams, he had to find past papers, model papers as he wanted to face the exam with best pre-preparation. Pushpakumara said that “I spent at least two to three days to find the past papers, sometimes I had to go to Mathara or to Colombo, there are no classes nearby, these past papers are not to be found in libraries as well as book shops.”

Finally he joined the government sector; again he faced the same problem, when he sat to Efficiency Bar exam (EB). “I feel that the future generation should not face the problems that I had to go through. So that is why I decided to develop a web site with Question papers and model papers targeting the government exam. I have also prepared a project proposal for ICT Agency of Sri Lanka’s Community Assistance Programme (CAP) they have assisted me a lot to complete this project”


Lankaexamhelp (http://www.lankaexamhelp.com) website contains questions and model questions & answer papers for ten government competitive exams. They have also uploaded recent past papers and at least ten model papers for each exam. All papers & the answer papers can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.lankaexamhelp.com. Especially the content of the site is available in Local language-Sinhala.

Pushpakumara added further. “We wanted to develop this site further and need to translate the content in to Tamil language too. I know that sometimes we can sort-out some problems using ICT and I also know that we should not wait until the work is done by the government. We can start, I think we are empower enough to find a own solution for native problems using ICT”

http://www.lankaexamhelp.com

Shriyananda Rathnayake

1 comment:

sina said...

nice info.......thanks for shring
http://www.techzar-web-developers.com/