Shafika Isaacs, founding Executive Director of SchoolNet Africa, the network that links education policymakers, teachers and learners in 31 African countries, has been a Senior Programme Officer for the International Development Research Centre and an independent consultant on ICTs for development in Africa for many years. As a South African member of eLA’s Organising Committee, she looks back at the development of ICTs […]

  Lyson Chikunduzi, mathematics lecturer at Zambia’s Copperbelt College of Education, reports that all last year’s college graduates were able to use a computer to present their lessons.

Two Nigerian teenagers had never touched a computer keyboard before they joined a learning programme known as the Ajegunle.org Capacity Building Exercise. Nwanyiego Ijeh, a girl known as Ego, and a young man, James O. Raphael, lived and worked in Ajegunle, a dangerous part of Lagos, populated by three million people from all the tribes of West Africa. This year, former Ajegunle trainees will […]

They call it a mobile internet kiosk. It’s nothing more than an old car battery wired through a cheap electrical inverter to an ancient personal computer. The three items are loaded onto a hired handcart and delivered by manpower to the “very back of beyond” in Western Kenya.

  In Kenya’s remote North Rift, the eLearning project “Good School Neighbours” is helping to bring peace to armed and nomadic peoples. The project gives students, teachers and opinion-makers the chance to encourage dialogue and peaceful co-existence between the feuding rural communities in this vast, arid region, home to around 1.8 million people, where armed cattle-rustling has been a way of life.

With a geographic base in nine southern African countries, financial underpinnings of about fifteen million Units of Account (1 UA = 1 US$1.48) from the African Development Fund, and a mature development strategy, the Open and Distance Learning Project launched by the Southern African Development Organization (SADC) secretariat in 2007 provides a paradigm for how a large-scale capacity-building effort should come into being. The […]

A pioneering project aimed at training ICT skills is transforming the lives of children who live in the streets of Eldoret, an agriculturally rich town in Kenya’s lush Rift Valley region. Led by SNV, a Dutch development agency, in collaboration with the “Ex-Street Children Community Organisation” (ECCO), a group of formerly homeless young people, the initiative provides street children with basic computer skills, thereby […]

    In Entebbe, on the Northern shores of Lake Victoria, sits one of Uganda’s few private higher-education institutions: Nkumba University. Until a short time ago, the University staff faced tremendous administrative obstacles with respect to their ICT equipment. Budget restrictions and growing maintenance and electricity costs highlighted the need for an innovative solution to address the challenges that this progressive university had to […]

The International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD) and the Ugandan government have signed an agreement to expand the Rural Information System programme, which helps farmers to increase their income through ICT-enabled crop-marketing services. So far, twenty-six existing Agricultural Cooperative Enterprises (ACEs) in isolated areas throughout Uganda have become part of the Rural Information System programme over the last eight years. These centres enable […]

    Nestling in the beautiful Ezulwini Valley in Swaziland, St. Mary’s High School educates over 500 students. The majority are from “child-headed” families, in which one or more children have taken over as the head of their household and fend for themselves without any adults to look after them. In view of its tight budget for acquiring technology, the school was looking for […]