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Security, Investment and Learning

By Dr Harold Elletson Some months before he was elected President of the Republic of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta addressed the Africa Forum on Business and Security, an annual conference of business leaders and security experts. “We are here,” he said, “because the unique conditions of our time make the discussion on security ever more important and ever more personal for each one of us.” His […]

Opinions

New Models of Management Education for Africa

  By Guy Pfeffermann During the last decade a team of researchers interviewed executives in thousands of firms in twenty countries, including hospitals and schools, about the quality of management in these organisations – the most comprehensive such research ever undertaken. The researchers found that, when they sorted the twenty countries by levels of affluence (gross domestic product per person), the two rankings – quality […]

Opinions

“Entrepreneurship Isn’t About Easy Money”

A number of African pioneers and entrepreneurs have ventured towards establishing technology start-up companies and innovation hubs.  The eLearning Africa Report interviews Markos Lemma co-founder of iceaddis, an innovation hub based in Ethiopia Please tell us about your personal journey: what was your most influential formative educational experience as you were growing up? I never went to any particularly exceptional schools in my childhood. […]

Field Stories

Harnessing TV White Spaces for Learning

What constitutes good connectivity?  The answers to this question seem to be related to personal experience: dial-up users think that every other option is great, whereas ADSL users want cheaper, faster upload and download speeds.  So we need to start with the premise that good connectivity is subject to the individual user’s experience, and this is by no measure an observation unique to South […]

Field Stories

Seeds 2.0 to Modernise and Boost the Agricultural Sector

“Really? But what has the agricultural sector got to do with Web 2.0?” That was the sarcastic question I was asked one day when I was describing the Web 2.0 training that I provide to CTA (the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation). It was an understandable question; on the one hand the Web 2.0 concept seemed to be a current reality reserved […]

Field Stories

African Vision

When we were building Teachers Media’s strategy for Africa, I decided that we should attend the Conference of Ministers of Education of the African Union (COMEDAF) in Abuja, Nigeria. At COMEDAF, many education ministers, passionate educators and decision makers decide the vision and focus for African education. On my way to Abuja, I landed in Lagos, not realising that the local and International airports […]

Field Stories

Managing a Critical Situation

“In rural South Africa, a man arrived at the local hospital with the classic symptoms of heart failure. All that was needed to confirm the diagnosis, and decide upon an appropriate treatment, was one test. The first attempt to carry out the test was foiled by broken equipment. When a replacement device was found the doctor on duty discovered it had run out of […]

Opinions

It All Adds Up: Mobile Learning and Numeracy Education

According to the Education for All (EFA) goals, all children should achieve ‘recognised and measurable learning outcomes…especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills’ by 2015. While literacy has come a long way, numeracy has been largely neglected as a goal by the international education agenda so far. By grade four, many children worldwide do not master basic numeracy competencies such as measuring, estimating […]

Conference sneak preview

“eLearning Africa has torch-lit the ICT & innovation capability in me”

eLearning Africa brings together 1,500 education and training professionals from all over the Continent and across all sectors. Every participant has their own story to tell of how they came to be involved in the world of technology-enhanced education and ultimately the eLearning Africa conference itself. In this edition of the newsletter we present the experiences of a first-time participant and speaker at eLearning […]

Trends

African Libraries in the Digital Age: “reaching outside their walls”

“I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library”, mused the Argentine writer Jorge Louis Borges in 1960. Now, fifty years later, most of us are more likely to turn to the Internet than a librarian when seeking information. Archives of books, journals and articles are being digitised and uploaded on a wide scale; encyclopaedias and dictionaries are not only available free-of-charge online […]