The ongoing Digital Revolution marked a major step forward as process designed to transform Albania’s education system too as an important cooperation agreement was signed today between the Albanian government and the Albanian-American Development Foundation  on creating an initial bunch of 100 SMART laboratories in nine-year schools across the country and the new coding program in the pre-university education system.

Prime Minister Edi Rama, who attended the signing ceremony, said that this government’s important commitment was especially driven by the students themselves during consultation meetings with them, coordinated by the Minister of State for Youth and Children, with them repeatedly stressing the necessity to upgrade and take the school computer labs to a whole new level.

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Today we have come together to kick-start a radically transformative process, part of our digital revolution that was particularly driven by the pupils and high-school students themselves at the intensive communication we had during a campaign of consultation meetings coordinated by the Minister of State for Youth and Children regarding the indispensability of taking the school computer labs, which physically exists in our schools across the country, but which actually do little if not nothing as part of their mission, because they are really outdated given that children are really computer geeks today and they are much faster than the speed rate with which the logistics is changing and developing over all these years, since the computer labs started first to be installed.

We will commence with an initial group of 100 next generation labs in 100 schools across the country and this is just the beginning.

We will press ahead with this process as it is our ambition to install as soon as possible such SMART labs in every school throughout the country. However, it certainly requires funding and good know-how and command of the process.

With the Albanian Development Fund, we are also working on transformation of the Pyramid, which will soon open its doors after having been transformed into the region’s largest innovation centre and thus becoming a haven for young people, who wish to go further in the field of technology, as it is currently the case with the Tumo center housed inside one of the spaces of our national stadium Air Albania, and as it will also be the case with many other similar centres we will keep opening all over the country.

Preparations are underway to develop a new system of methods of teaching informatics starting next new school year, and such a system will then be extended throughout the country, not only in these smart laboratories, but also in the existing IT labs to improve teaching quality through a team of selected teachers.

 Michael said that the AADF is a partner and it is our goal to have other partners, not only institutional partners such as the World Bank, which is committed to provide funding in this aspect, but also other partners that we are trying to attract to this initiative so that Albania 2030 is completely a different country by 2030.