Mountain View, Calif., Kigali, Rwanda and Nairobi, Kenya, March 19,
2007 — Google Inc. today announced separate partnerships with the
Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network
(KENET). As a result, Rwanda’s educational institutions and government
ministries, and Kenya’s universities are starting to use Google Apps™
– Google’s set of hosted and customizable communications services.
Students in both African countries as well as Rwandan government
officials will have access to free communications tools including
email, shared calendars, instant messaging and word processing under
their institutions’ domain names.
Rwandan Minister of State for Energy and Communications, The Hon
Albert Butare, said: “This partnership will be a boost in terms of
services offered to our Rwandan Academic Institutions, allowing them
to collaborate in their learning activities. Furthermore, I believe
communication between students and their lecturers will be enhanced as
users throughout the country will now be using the same state-of-the-
art, cutting edge technology that is available in other parts of the
world.”
Three Rwandan universities – the National University of Rwanda, the
Kigali Institute for Education and the Kigali Institute for Science
and Technology – will initially have access to Google Apps Education
Edition, while the country’s government ministries will be using
Google Apps Standard Edition. During this first phase, around 20,000
users in Rwanda will have access to these services. A broader
countywide rollout will follow shortly afterwards.
The University of Nairobi’s 50,000 students will be the first to be
offered Google Apps for Education in Kenya. These services will then
be extended to 150,000 Kenyan students at universities across the
country. The rollout will be jointly coordinated by Google and KENET.
Shona Brown, Senior Vice President of Business Operations at Google
added: “Google has a simple ambition – to help organize the world’s
information, making it universally accessible and useful. For us,
universality is crucial because we believe everyone should have access
to the same services – wherever they live, whatever their language and
regardless of income. I am delighted that we have signed this deal and
look forward to working with other African governments to make life-
enhancing services like free email, instant messaging and PC-to-PC
phone calls more widely available across Africa.”
Google Apps allows institutions as well as individuals to use Google’s
communication and collaboration applications under their own domain
names. All services are hosted by Google and are available to users
via any web-based PC. Google Apps includes the following services:
* Gmail™ – provides users with 2 gigabytes of storage, highly
effective spam and powerful search. Gmail includes instant messaging
within the email interface;
* Google Calendar™ – is an online calendar that makes it easy for
people to organize their lives and share schedules with others;
* Google Talk™ – lets users make PC-to-PC voice calls and send instant
messages to each other for free;
* Google Docs & Spreadsheets™ – allows people to create and
collaborate on documents and spreadsheets without the need to email
attachments back and forth. Different people from within the same
organization can work on a document at the same time. All revisions
are recorded for editing, and controls enable people to define who can
and cannot share the information; and
* Google Page Creator™ – This what-you-see-is-what-you-get web page
authoring tool lets domain administrators build simple web pages for
their domain and publish them to the web even if they don’t have any
website building experience.
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