This is Kirsten, again from the Online Educa Berlin 2012.
I was just attending a session about implementing ICT in Africa which was pretty interesting, indeed. I was able to follow experts from different African countries, namely Mauritius, Namibia and Kenya from the African Development Bank.
The level set was different challenges Africa is faced with in elearning which includes political will to change or improve. Of course also the availability of solar energy, the development of hardware and software. But efforts have been made, already. For instance the African Development Bank designed their own LMS in 2010 already and its now being used in the organization.
In Namibia we heard that computers are available in all schools, at least at a certain level apparently. They have also developed an ICT curriculum. The challenge here was to convince the educators to buy into this idea of ICT. Challenges in Namibia are Internet connection also it is state subsidized.
We could resume that the knowledge base itself is relatively low but there have been various initiatives to change this and it was a very interesting session. Of course we in the developed countries can also learn a lot from the African countries, how to bring education to the masses with simple devices. I just got reminded that basically every African family own a radio but not a computer. So the ubiquitous medium of radio is still very valuable for educational use.
