I’m a man of faith. I believe in Jesus’ resurrection, which we will celebrate this coming Sunday. But some things are beyond resurrection!
“One of the major challenges we encountered was the lack of adequate equipment such as computers.”
Taken from an update by a GLO partner in 2023
So many of our amazing leaders, and their teams, struggle on, using tired laptops which are painfully slow, often crash and are barely able to handle the demands of opening a spreadsheet.
We need to do something right now. I once lost three weeks of work when my computer crashed – for these key leaders it’s happening on a regular basis and is so frustrating, debilitating and damaging to their ministry.*
Here’s a video I recorded at the office of our partner EE. They have a little collection of somehow-still-functioning dinosaur laptops (from 2013!) that have almost miraculously survived the dust and heat for over a decade:
That’s why we want to send 150 laptops this month to support the vital work in Burundi. These computers are tools which will be used for the transformation of lives!
For example, UCCD use laptops and projectors to give university-level education to rural communities. Harvest Initiatives use them for the Jesus film outreach, through which thousands have come to faith. New Generation co-ordinate their transformative outreach of street-connected youth. Partners like HTV and Trans World Radio edit programmes to broadcast to millions!
This Easter, please help us enable our partners to focus on what is really important – transforming Burundi and beyond through the power of the resurrected Jesus!
Costing just £140 each, we want to give 150 quality laptops to our partners, schools and other projects in need. Will you help us?
I’d love for you to get involved – If you want to contribute, click here:
Dear Simon
It was a great blessing to listen to you preach yesterday and today. I have just come across this post and thought I would reach out to you.
I am a mostly self-taught IT professional. Admittedly I don’t deal with hardware too much myself and I suppose whoever is involved in the purchase of these laptops will make it all work.
But since the plan is to buy refurbished laptops I thought I would mention it that with Windows 10 losing support in October 2025 many laptops will no longer receive any security patches afterward making them vulnerable to all kinds of malicious attacks.
In the past it was sometimes possible to upgrade to a new version of Windows at no extra cost. It was up to the owner to decide whether they expected their laptop to cope with higher hardware requirements or accept slower running system or add some additional memory etc. This time round Microsoft is making this decision for us and is stopping users from upgrading to Windows 11 if their device does not match their exact specification.
I am hoping that your laptops will either match this (ideally have Windows 11 rather than 10 already installed) or you are open to work with alternative systems like Linux which has lower hardware requirements and often offers many years of security patches. With laptops now being used mostly for emails or to access content like educational materials on the web it is less relevant what system is running on the laptop and some Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Linux Mint are just as user friendly as their commercial competitors from Microsoft and Apple. If you have a choice I would only encourage you to consider brands known for their out of the box support for Linux like Dell so even if you use Windows to start with you can consider moving to Linux when the Microsoft support runs out but hardware is still in working order.
Also, this and next year there will be a lot of companies replacing their laptops due to the incompatibility with Windows 11. The expected flood of decommissioned hardware might be an opportunity to our brothers and sisters in Africa who are looking to use laptops for education or work and think Linux would work for them.
Lastly, you are probably aware of some charities specialising in supplying laptops to Africa for educational purposes. I would be happy to either contact them on your behalf or support you in any way I can.
Please feel free to email me.
God bless