Mateusz Morawiecki announced the initiative during a visit to a school in the village of Zatory, central Poland, the state PAP news agency reported.
He told the media: “The programme we are launching today is worth over PLN 500 million; we will be providing computers and tablets to children and young people from schools in areas that were dominated by collective farming under communism."
He added that the programme "seeks, above all, to equalise opportunities.”
He told reporters that the project “opens a new era in education, supplying children and teenagers with the tools to realise their dreams and ambitions."
Deputy Prime Minister Henryk Kowalczyk said that more policies would follow to help children from poorer areas.
Janusz Cieszyński, a government official in charge of digitisation at the Prime Minister's Office, said that thanks to the new programme, some 220,000 children in rural areas "will have the same opportunities as their peers in big cities.”
More than 215,000 computers, 3,000 tablets
Worth over PLN 586 million (around EUR 130 million), the programme is designed to provide digital devices and internet access to children and adolescents in 1,604 villages whose residents once worked in the country’s communist-era state-run farms, the PAP news agency reported.
So far, families around the country have applied for more than 215,000 computers and laptops as well as more than 3,000 tablets under the programme, officials said.
The European Union is expected to help finance the initiative, reporters were told.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, IAR