Thursday, March 6, 2025
When it comes to keeping up with your neighbours, ICT development is often where many African nations lag behind. And as the digital gap widens, more economic opportunities are likely to slip through the gaps. Surrounded by South Africa, one of the continent’s most advanced digital landscapes, educator’s in Lesotho are taking it upon themselves to try to keep pace.
Imagine coming home from a long vacation and finding out that the language you used to speak has evolved into something unrecognisable. Your father insists on being addressed as mdosi and your girlfriend will only respond to mshakaji. Oh and forget about buying cigarettes – since you’ve been gone, a rapper has popularised a new word for those, too.
Discussions about Africa’s challenges appear to be never-ending. But amongst the common perceptions of Africa, often the fact that charismatic leaders like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Wangari Maathai drew their power from the environment they lived in, found support in their communities regionally and eventually received international recognition, is ignored.
As early school dropout rates in Tanzania continue to be a major problem both in villages and towns alike, a vocational training college is getting to the root of the problem by turning learners into ‘studentpreneurs’ , using a self-sufficiency model where the education pays for itself.
Digital literacy is just as important as reading, writing and maths. This is the message the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organisation supporting open source projects, wants to spread as it powers forward to provide a web that’s empowering and educating people. Because, they say, “we can’t do it alone.”
Advancements in training and technology that cater specifically to the needs of African journalists are beginning to pave the way for a new era in African journalism.
Entrepreneurs Eskinder Mamo and Amanuel Abrha were born and raised in Ethiopia, but after completing their higher education in Europe have since been based in Berlin, Germany. After the successful launch of their IT and business consulting startup, they are now determined to use their experience abroad to help contribute to the development of their country of origin.
Women selling fruit, handicrafts, milk or eggs all have one thing in common: the main problem they have faced up until now is that they have had no way to access markets beyond the one down the road from their farm or home… until now.
Andrew Carnegie once said, “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.” Today, libraries are just as important as they were in Carnegie’s time, serving as ‘e-hubs,’ where citizens can access scholarly research from around the world.
The Ebola crisis in West Africa exposed the overwhelming need for trained healthcare professionals. But as many educational institutions are already stretched to their capacities, more and more eLearning modules are being developed to train much-needed nurses, midwives and other health workers outside the classroom.
