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= New Partnership for Africa's Development E-School Program = Wikipedia Page so far: New Partnership for Africa's Development E-School Program

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is a program aiming to bring economic development to African nations. Within this program, an e-School Program is included as a means to provide IT equipment, such as computers, and internet access to all schools in the nations involved in the NEPAD program.

Origins and Goals
This plan was developed in 2003 at the African Economic Summit. The project aims to provide computers, internet access, and other Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to all schools in Africa within 10 years, under the NEPAD agreement. The main goal of the program is to expand students' ability to learn in schools through internet connection and technology access. This is an initiative to provide more equality and access to education across African schools. The program does this by bringing techniques used elsewhere, ICT, to provide more academic opportunities for Africa children to succeed.

Demonstration Projects
Th initial step in implementing the E-School Program has been 'Demo Projects' aimed to understand the most effective methods and the different situations which may be incurred along the implementation process. The main goals of these projects was to show "the costs, benefits, appropriateness and challenges of a satellite based network" which would be implemented under this program. These projects have been headed by "the private sector partners... AMD, Cisco, HP, Microsoft and Oracle". These companies has 'consortias' which contained many other companies working with them on the initiative as well.

Six schools from 16 African countries participated in these Demo Projects but some (Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda) had many more projects and investment into their programs than others. The Demo Project was only intended to last one year but faced challenges causing an extension. The project's aim was to discover the 'best practices' of implementing the program and

Successes
The e-Schools program has proven to be one of the more successful projects within NEPAD; schools which are considered NEPAD schools are considered more effective than non-NEPAD schools, even despite staff qualifications at both schools. Overall, many schools have received access to internet and ICT technology through the advancement of the E-Schools program.

The first school to benefit from this project was Bugulumbya Secondary School in Uganda. The schools involved in the Demonstration Projects were able to utilize the ICT given to them early on in the preliminary test stages of the project. Two noteworthy nations which were involved in these projects were Rwanda and Kenya.

Rwanda
Rwanda has seen growth in their secondary school program over the past two decades. Rwanda was one of the nations which received ICT under a 'Demonstration Project' in 2006 which allowed a chance to utilize a new technology. However, one study claims the objectives of the e-schools program have not been met as he delves into the experiences of the program in Rwanda. One of the primary reasons is due to lack of ability to fund such an expensive program in nations with weak infrastructures. Many schools found it difficult to fully utilize the ICT which they were receiving from the program due to lack of funding, teacher training, and knowledge about the ICTs themselves. The project was not deemed unsuccessful in its own goals but rather unable to reach them due to lack of teacher education and policies able to place Rwanda on a more high achieving educations trajectory.

Kenya
Kenya has also seen successful implementations of the NEPAD e- School program. A study was done to compare the learning opportunities and resources of NEPAD schools versus non-NEPAD schools in Kenya. In this study, measures of the integration of the provided Information and Computer Technology (ICT) and the successes across six provinces in Kenya. The researchers selected six schools of each type (NEPAD and non-NEPAD) and used a questionnaire to determine the level of success of the schools within the recent past of the schools. They found that e-learning had been much more successful in application in NEPAD schools.

Criticisms and Solutions
As of 2012, not much change had been made towards the goal of the E-Schools Program. The countries which had the most initial investment have seen the most success with the program. Many nations are still working to implement the program and utilize new ICT technologies in their school systems but have often found other obstacles, as mentioned above, in their way.

Poor African nations are often unable to invest enough money into the program to make actual change. The program is a costly one and many nations in Africa do not have enough money or infrastructure to put adequate investment into the program. The program itself is not a failure or even one with poor intentions but instead has faced many obstacles in its implementation as is common in social projects in Africa. This can be combatted through more investment in educational infrastructure at the most basic levels such as teacher training and school funding. In the aforementioned study done in Kenya, researchers found one of the largest downfalls of the implementation of ICT into African schools to be the lack of teacher support and resources.

Many schools have also been critical of the post-demo project sustainability of the program. However, the project and schools themselves have worked to solve this through sustainability plans and tweaking the necessities of the plans.