Today POTRAZ is going to launch an information centre in St Albert’s Village. So far 23 containerised village information centres have been set up in Zimbabwe. Known as CVICs, these centres are funded through POTRAZ’s Universal Fund programme.

These CVICs are equipped with computers and are meant to plug the gap between rural areas and urban areas in terms of access to the internet and computers. The hope is that villagers will use these computers to access the internet for basic tasks such as email and for research purposes e.g. researching how to grow certain crops and learning about crop or animal diseases.

Hopefully, this project goes better than previous such attempts from the government that are often abandoned after launch. Famous past failures include former Robert Mugabe’s famous computer donations to rural schools. These half-baked attempts often failed at the implementation stage. For example, some schools that received these computers had no electricity to power these computers and so they were left to gather dust unused.

The same has happened to computers at most ZIMPOST centres that were donated by the government during the GNU era.