Field Stories

Maurice
Field Stories

Mauritius Country Profile

The first Europeans to have visited Mauritius were the Portuguese at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In 1598, a Dutch naval expedition landed in a sheltered bay on a volcanic island in the Indian Ocean. Its members decided to name the island after the fleet’s main vessel, the “Mauritius”, which in turn had been named after Holland’s Prince Maurits van Nassau. They introduced […]

Field Stories

German Development Cooperation: Promoting the Use of ICT for Refugee Education

It was not a coincidence that this year’s eLearning Africa was held under the patronage of the German Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Dr. Gerd Müller. 2016 is the year of digital education in Germany! This year, the German Government has declared digital education a priority of its national Digital Agenda. German Development Cooperation has also recognized the high potential of ICT […]

Field Stories

SPHEIR: driving innovation for higher education reform

The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) has recently launched the SPHEIR programme – Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education Innovation and Reform.  This is backed by £45m of UK-government funds and aims to transform aspects of higher education in low-income countries. It will support approximately twelve multi-actor partnerships to improve access, quality, relevance and affordability of higher education over an initial five-year period. Its […]

Field Stories

Technology helps keep girls in school in Africa

According to the 2015 UN Millennium Development Goals Report, around 33 million children of primary school age and 22 million adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa are out of school. 55% of those children are girls. Camfed, an international non-profit organisation, is addressing this problem in an innovative way. Camfed has developed a new alert technology within its programme and financial database to help ensure that […]

Field Stories

How eLearning saved a university in crisis

Making eLearning accessible to all isn’t just about boosting class performance; in some cases, it can actually mean the difference between an institution shutting down or staying open. In October 2015, student uprisings, organised around the hashtag #feesmustfall, interrupted business as usual at campuses across South Africa. The protests were initially organised in response to a 10.5% increase in fees at the University of […]

Field Stories

AMECSE: Discover the future of software innovation

The Africa and Middle East Conference on Software Engineering (AMECSE) is back this year in Cairo. The region’s first conference in this field, to be held in partnership with eLearning Africa, is currently calling for proposals on the theme: “OPEN—DEVELOP—INNOVATE”. Organised by the Software Engineering Competence Center (SECC) of the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), conference participants can expect to discuss the most […]

Field Stories

Knowledge on the Nile: Egypt launches ‘world’s largest digital library’

Egypt is justly famed for its ancient centres of learning. Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, founded over a thousand years ago, maintains its pre-eminence as the country’s most venerable degree-granting institution, and the legendary library of Alexandria, whose establishment predated Al-Azhar’s by more than a millennium, was reputedly one of the largest and most significant in the ancient world.

Field Stories

Scaling up education without letting quality slide

‘Scaling up’ has been a recurrent theme in discussions surrounding education and technology in recent years. The rise of the internet – and its attendant connectivity – is seen by many as representing a golden opportunity for the scaling up of educational projects in Africa. With its rapidly growing young population increasingly representing an ever greater demand for education, upscaling has indeed moved from […]