Mr. John Fitzsimons:

To address the question on whether we have documented our learning, the answer is "Yes". Every year we issue an incredibly detailed and transparent monitoring and evaluation report. I challenge the committee to find another charity which gives such a transparent view. Not all of it is great. We have learned a lot over the past ten years.

Some nine years ago we shipped computers to Ethiopia, put them into schools and hoped the magic would happen, but it did not. We soon learned that one had to train the teachers, so we started sending volunteers from Ireland five or six years ago to do that. It was great, but it was only one month out of 12. We realised that computers break and we needed local support and trainers. We set up entities in each of the countries. To this day, we are focused on working with ministries on education outcomes such as numeracy and literacy. We have completely changed what we do over the past ten years. There is no silver bullet for ICT and education. It is incredibly hard work.