Today’s post comes courtesy of Jessica Mabe, ThirdForce UK Public Sector Manager
Last month, MindLeaders ThirdForce exhibited at the eLearning in Africa conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The aim of the conference was to demonstrate best practices and new ways of delivering learning – with a particular focus on Youth, Skills and Employability amongst the African countries. During my five day visit in Tanzania, conference delegates from all parts of Africa – particularly Kenya, Nigeria, and the Congo shared their current learning infrastructure set up along with the restrictions and challenges they face.
During my two hour journey to cover the five mile distance to the conference, I was imagining the levels of road rage and frustration that would have ensued if this were taking place in the UK. So, I was surprised to see road users taking this as the norm and I found myself thinking about the implications this must bring to businesses and the general economy when they are still battling with transport congestion issues during crucial business hours? It was here I started drawing comparisons between Africa and Colombia (where I grew up); two nations classified under emerging and developing economy status where it’s common to see the plights of poverty and challenges associated with the absence of a robust infrastructure plays a major impact in the up-skilling and growth of an economy.
The African market now have access to broadband and mobile phones, but connectivity is very much a new trend as up until the beginning of the year, most African countries had limited connectivity access and relied heavily on satellite service. The recent deployment of optic fibre cables has helped paved the way in facilitating broadband and stronger connectivity giving new opportunities for these countries to increase their efficiency levels.
So it certainly has been an exciting time making our contributing to the introduction of elearning to varying organisations in Africa such as schools, colleges, universities, government departments and coordinated projects currently being put together to be able to reach rural communities that still do not have access to this type of training and the infrastructure to facilitate it.
Reflecting back on my time at the conference, I can see that whilst Africa is still in early stages of adopting elearning, there is deep thirst to increase awareness around functionality and the use of various learning technologies, platforms and tools that facilitate learning. Delegates were overwhelmed by the amount of varying tools used to facilitate learning and I believe these conferences will help Africa to collaborate with late adopters of these learning technologies and harness the facilitation of best practice.
What do you think?
In reflection of your observations between Tanzania, where I come from, and Colombia undoubtedly much more ahead of the game, I get the distinct impression how the emerging and developing economies and progresses made only would trickle to elearning as the wealth in the countries grow. My limited views of the potential restrictions and challenges to elearning that would exist would largely stem from limitations in wealth. However, the proportionality of this wealth distribution towards learning is largely guided by donor driven conditionalities as much as will from our leaders. The role played by elearning over the general learning is perhaps the best route to propagate education, with arguably a greater strength in more competent teaching and assessing bodies that are more accessible to the masses quicker and in greater numbers. Emphasis of reading and writing made in Tanzania from the days of Tanzania’s founder, Mwalimu Nyerere has indeed made it more and more possible for the Tanzanians to take advantages of further and higher education. Tanzania’s reading and writing levels are quite good and possibly better than some of the countries with higher GDP. However, the threat of undermining this progress is largely around quality of our teachers locally, both in terms of the training they receive and incentifications they have thereafter. With Teachers being amongst the lowest paid profession in the Country, access to learning at higher levels is increasingly becoming a priviledge to those with money. If elearning is to accelerate access to “better” teachers and i.e. better learning, access to computers and internet to the masses is the way forward. I wonder what the impression you had to the level of access to these media was?