The Turing Trust — Refurbished Computers & Offline E-Libraries for Malawi's Secondary Schools

The Turing Trust is a UK charity, founded in memory of Alan Turing, that reuses computers destined for landfill from corporate and institutional donors. Machines are wiped, refurbished and shipped to under-resourced schools in sub-Saharan Africa pre-loaded with offline e-library software, so students can access educational content without paying for internet connectivity.

Its largest programme aims to expand IT-lab access in Malawi's secondary schools and to work around rural electrification gaps that would otherwise block computer use.

Work began in 2015-16 in Malawi's Northern Region in partnership with the Centre for Youth and Development in Mzuzu, later formalised as the local organisation Computers for Enhanced Education (CEE). The programme has since expanded into the Central and Southern regions, with a Lilongwe office opened in 2020 and a third office planned for Blantyre; each partner school typically receives around 20 refurbished PCs. To work around rural electrification gaps, the Trust has also built solar-powered IT classrooms from repurposed shipping containers running low-energy Raspberry Pi computers, and has trained local teachers to deliver IT lessons independently.

In 2016, only about 5% of Malawian secondary schools had any computer access nationally; in the Northern Region, where the Trust has worked longest, 81% of secondary schools now have IT-lab access. Partner schools reported a 20% increase in university attendance after IT teaching began, and the Trust cites labour-market data suggesting IT-skilled graduates earn roughly 39% more on average. One documented cohort trained 67 local teachers, of whom more than 30 became able to independently deliver practical IT lessons.

Most published figures originate from the Turing Trust's own reporting rather than an independent third-party evaluation, and no publicly available randomised or quasi-experimental impact study was found, so these results should be read as programme-reported outcomes rather than causally verified impact.