Meet our best friend, RACHEL.

At Regain 37 for our online learning business, we have special friend that forms the heart and soul of the service we offer off-grid schools, her name is RACHEL.

Rachel is an acronym for Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning. It was developed by World Possible and is a portable plug-and-play server that stores educational websites and makes the content available over a local offline wireless connection. Rachel has been used across the world to bring online learning to the remotest of communities. As open-source system, it works on the basis that education is a fundamental human right.

The Rachel server comes pre-loaded with very useful content for learners. The server includes content such as UNESCO primary school, Khan academy, Wikipedia, and Edu games. In Sierra Leone, it helped increase the English literacy of students by 67%! The most revolutionary part of the server for us at Regain 37 is the ability to upload local content.

For Regan 37, uploading local content is more than just providing children access to textbooks that are usually in short supply. It includes children having access to past exam papers so that they can revise as much as possible. It includes providing children access to locally produced novels and short stories. By providing such a platform for reading, we hope such a system contributes to providing our local creative industry an outlet for some of their books. By partnering with us, their books can reach thousands of children who desperately need to read books about themselves.

This is the magic of Rachel and why we call her our best friend. The server helps Regain 37 reach thousands of young children and also, more importantly, create a knowledge base that is indigenous and speaks to our history, culture, and dreams as Zimbabwe. The durability, potential and potency of Rachel is strengthened by its energy source being solar panelled power. It creates an important trident of education, renewable energy and rural communities taking a further step in reducing the digital divide.