Ulwazi Outreach

Ulwazi is an initiative born out of a need for the Department of Information Systems to engage with the community at large. Ulwazi aims to positively impact the Grahamstown community in conjunction with students who have an active interest in making a difference. A variety of projects with the community at heart will be undertaken and seen through to completion.

There is no questioning that technology has taken the world by storm. We would like to see an environment that vigorously attempts to keep afloat in the tide of technology. The Ulwazi initiative aims to realise ways to assist the community from a technological perspective. Ultimately Ulwazi Outreach would like to yield a new breed of Grahamstown community empowered through the transfer of ICT skills.

Project: Department of Health
As the community engagement efforts of the department were on hold due to the pandemic this year, we were able to restart the programme. The first project we are involved in has been with the Department of Health through the Makana Health District. Due to a shift in traditional data capturing procedures, various issues arose, including overburdening data capture and information loss, which is critical to the Health Department's daily operations.

As a result, the Makana Health Department engaged with the Rhodes Community Engagement Office and the Department of Information Systems to digitise data capturing in primary and hospital healthcare. This was made possible under the leadership of the Community Engagement Director, Ms Diane Hornby and Mr Mohammed Docrat from the Health Department.

Postgraduate and undergraduate students from the IS department who exhibit dedication and devotion in their work participate in the training three days a week. The students' primary function is to train professional nurses with computer literacy skills for the new digitisation working strategy. The project started in April this year and is still ongoing.

Project: Rhodes Day Care Centre
The second initiative we have been involved in has been through the Rhodes Day Care Centre, which has asked that we help with the process of helping set up their webpage. We have our students involved through the website write-up and update this site. We look forward to more exciting projects for this year.

Last Modified: Fri, 24 Jun 2022 14:10:06 SAST