Child soldiers to get PC training

Sierra Leone's child soldiers will be asked to turn in their guns in return for PC training.

Francis George, who runs Norwegian internet consultancy Kizuki, wants to set up a vocational training centre in the troubled country in a bid to teach computer and programming skills to the former rebels.

George said that now the fighting had finished it was time to educate the children who were taken away from school to fight in the war.

More than half of the 15,000 former rebel fighters in Sierra Leone were under 15 years old and George hopes that the project will be the first step towards developing West Africa as a regional hub for the computer industry.

The child army imposed a reign of terror by hacking off the limbs of victims with machetes. Now George said the best way to rehabilitate the children is to teach them new skills.

"If you have a population that is information literate, things like diseases and other problems can be tackled in a more serious way than if you have a population that is information illiterate," he said.

So far George's plan has won the backing of the Norwegian government and several companies are interested in providing money for the scheme.

He hopes to have the first centres open by the Autumn and estimates that, within three years, they will have trained enough people for Sierra Leone to become a centre for the outsourcing of software programming.

George maintained that such a centre could undercut India, which had already become a favourite for companies seeking to cut development costs.