how we bridge the digital divide in Gedaref Sudan? Gedaref Digital City Organization (GDCO ) is one of the civil society organizations in Gedaref State founded by a kind and generous initiative from Mr. Ben Waumans, the President of the Digital City of Eindhoven ,Mr. Amin Oraibi the Director General of Public Water Organization in Gedaref, Dr. Agnes Ovington, the head bureau of international coordination Eindhoven Municipality, Mr. Mohamed Elhossain the Director General of water corporation and Mohamed Tom Awadgeed the co-coordinator of the twinning of Gedaref-Eindhoven in 09-2004 as an idea and executed in 01-2005 at Gedaref Elementary School (El-Amiria ) with his Excellency Bashir Sahal Gomaa` who help a lot to establish this organization . In addition, to many people in Gedaref who are interested in computers . GDCO was fully supported by Gedaref State Government. National Information Centre, Information Supporting Fund and other private companies and our appreciations and thanks are extended to them all and with out their help GDCO will not become true. GDCO Mission & Vision: GDCO mission is the usage of ICT for human development and reduce the digital gap (Bridging the Digital Divide) and creation of equality in accessing the ICT. Fighting against poverty within the disable people specially the deaf children and orphans through the ICT. Planning to establish a big digital market in Gedaref and then in Sudan) also to help the society have their voice heard, and their memory activated for utilization and documentation for the State We work in GDCO using ICT in different direction and most of them within the Millennium Declaration. GDCO vision although it is the only digital city in Sudan but our vision that GDCO will be the biggest telecentre organization in Africa and the Middle East country Getting the World Summit (ICT summit) Declaration in Geneva and Tunisia become true What is the digital divide? The digital divide is the inequality of accessing of ICT and increased highly by two main factors: (1) The revolution in ICT. (2) Poverty. In our state poverty is the main factor rather than ICT revolution. How GDCO tackle the problem? By training our community starting with poorest part of the city. (1) Establishing many low cost telecentres in the town. (2) Keeping the price of the training courses minimum. (3) Training the disable, orphans, disable and poor students for free. (4) Using the schools as a media of training centers (5) Dividing the fees of the training between three partner ( school 33%, teachers 33% and organization (GDCO) 33%) and the organization (GDCO) use it 33% to pay for the stationery the note books and internet bill and so on. (6) Exchange of cultural knowledge between them and help them discus their problems through the internet. Why we trained the disables (deaf children)? 1/.more than 99% are very poor . 2/ they are considered a useless community and no one care about them. 3/ to show the people that challenges and IT can create a great things. 4/ Create a new source of revenue 5/ equal access to the ICT and access the knowledge society 6/ get them a way of communications to their families and friends through email and chatting instead of the signal language. 7/ teaching them how to improve their skills through the computers. What kind of trainings GDCO offered? The objective using of ITC for human development is very important issue so we should first have a good training for an equal access to the ICT. The Training aims at upgrading the abilities, capacity building and efficiencies of the State society to enable the sound development planning. The training will cover the following sectors: a) The Horizontal Sector (i.e. Gedaref Society OR community) b) The vertical or the Factional Sector (i.e. National Cadre in the Public (government), and Private Sector). We establish a system of tanning included three types of training centers : (1) A- Permanent centers: They include the headquarter centre and other co-operatives ones in the State and also include Smart Schools . (2) B-Residential areas centers They are temporary and teaching is carried out first at the demand of local dwellers and then after they pinpoint the right venue (may be school, club or where is possible). (3) C: Smart school centers These are training centers used to train the students in the mornings and the community at evenings. We started our training the poorest area in the city and we trained the disables orphans poor student for free the poor people for 50% or free if he is too poor the teachers for 50% . These humanitarian thing show the community that computers are not for rich people only but also poor people can access it so we have a very crowded center in 4 groups ( 80 ) and the net result is great and we open another two centers and the awareness and afraid ness in the people had been tackled. The training cost is about 15 dollars (5dollars to the teacher, 5dollars to the school, and 5dollars to our (GDCO). With our 5 dollars we pay for the stationeries, notes, internet and sometimes we subsidize every student with two dollars. and we open the centers near their home to save them money and to make it available for women and more than 60% of our student are females. Why (GDCO) train this cheap? (GDCO) train this cheap because we get 35 ( thirty five ) computers from eindhoven (city of Netherlands ) and we trained with them more than 500 people from different sectors and we receive another 303 computers from them we plan to train about 5000 students in summer vacation and more than 4000 in the community by the end of this year. Also we are expecting to receive another 1000 (one thousand) computer from Eindhoven this year in addition to the Gedaref State Government. National Information Centre, Information Supporting Fund and other private companies help us a lot. . What other incentives (GDCO) give to the community? (GDCO) know Bridging the Digital Divide is the great challenge of the 21st Century recognized by the Millennium Declaration. and providing access to the ICT tool will help to reduce this gap so we train in group of 15( fifteen) and when they finished the course we give the first and the second students with high scores a computer for free and we plan to give the third and the fourth ones a computer for 100 $. Also the first two students will get the second course for free. Our long term policy is to give every one we trained a computer with installments. In order to get the student practice we will open a big room (with 50 computers) but up to now we work with after training policy that every one we trained can enter our laboratories at any time to practice and also we have an electronic library for free to everyone to get his research. All Smart Schools and training centers we provide with 20 computers and if we trained 500 students we donate the computers to the school. We are planning to graduate all the students in 22 March 2007 in the presence of our guest his Excellency Mr. Alexander Sakker the mayor of Eindhoven and Mr. Ben Waumans the president of digital city of Eindhoven and the honorable members of the city council. So everyone who wants to attend this festival is warmly welcomed and let us know abusuha25@gmail.com . How we plan to protect the commercial computer centers in our city from going out of business? ` (GDCO) have a very nice training system, each student have a computer. In the lab we have 15 to 20 computers well established and we are using projectors for full time utilization for the lecture and a cheap cost of training which is different from the commercial centers were two or three students for one computers and no projectors and triple the cost so we plan to give every centre 10 tens pcs so he can reduce the price for more people to be trained and we help them to build strong infra structure with a minimum cost. www.gedarefcity.org or www.Gedaref.com