Our Story

LiteHaus International began from one small act of generosity in 2017 when young Australian, Jack Growden, donated his own personal laptop to a school in the remote Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Aged 20 at the time, Jack was studying his Honours thesis in human development, examining the challenges face by rural communities in accessing critical services such as education and health. Visiting the Kuta Primary School, he realised that the classroom had almost everything he had growing up at school in Australia – books, desks, chairs, blackboard, teachers – by no technology. He thought to himself how could this be a quality education if it was not a digital education given that the students would go on to live and work deep into the 2060s and 2070s. Jack promised community leaders that he would come back with twelve more laptops to build one of the very first digital classrooms in all of Papua New Guinea. 

Two days later, Jack was passing through Port Moresby International Airport when he saw his photo in The National newspaper with his promise outlined to the nation in a big, bold headline. He knew he really had to follow through with this now so he founded LiteHaus International the very next day in his Mum and Dad’s garage, and so the journey began. He tapped his best mates on the shoulder to drop in some cash, and gathered up secondhand devices one by one, until six months later, he returned to Kuta Primary School and installed the ground-breaking computer lab in front of hundreds of community members. His promise fulfilled, he and his great friend and local community leader, Peter Raim, agreed they could not stop there.