User:Rlewaldron/sandbox

Digital Services for Education in Africa
Who is the publication directed to?


 * Educators
 * IT developers/providers
 * Education technology services/providers
 * African educators

What main topics or themes does the publication cover?


 * Primary education
 * Sub-Saharan Africa
 * Information and communications technologies (ICT)
 * M-learning (m-education)
 * Collaboration in education

Article Evaluation

 * Links work; claims in this section are not directly related to education. Recommended steps to improve citations:
 * Remove or add citation: "This has been described as an African brain drain."
 * Add citation: "According to Naledi Pandor, the South African Minister of Science and Technology, even with the drain enrollments in Sub-Saharan African universities tripled between 1991 and 2005, expanding at an annual rate of 8.7%, which is one of the highest regional growth rates in the world."
 * Remove or add citation: "In the last 10 to 15 years interest in pursuing university level degrees abroad has increased."


 * Links seem to be unbiased and trustworthy
 * Some information is a bit outdated; references to university enrollment numbers from 2005, literacy rates from 2003, spending figures from 2007.
 * Current rating is C-Class.
 * Some WikiProjects are involved or are interested in the article: WikiProject Africa, WikiProject Geography, WikiProject Politics, Wikipedia CD Selection
 * There is a lot of discussion on the talk page regarding the use of the actual term "sub-Saharan" to refer to this region of Africa. This specific article subsection was recommended as a target article for the publication, so I will move forward with contributing and improving the section.

Article Edits
Forty percent of African scientists live in OECD countries, predominantly in Europe, the United States and Canada. This has been described as an African brain drain. According to Naledi Pandor, the South African Minister of Science and Technology, even with the drain enrollments in Sub-Saharan African universities tripled between 1991 and 2005, expanding at an annual rate of 8.7%, which is one of the highest regional growth rates in the world. In the last 10 to 15 years interest in pursuing university level degrees abroad has increased. In some OECD countries, like the United States, Sub-Saharan Africans are the most educated immigrant group.

According to the CIA, low global literacy rates are concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, West Asia and South Asia. However, the literacy rates in Sub-Saharan Africa vary significantly between countries. The highest registered literacy rate in the region is in Zimbabwe (90.7%; 2003 est.), while the lowest literacy rate is in South Sudan (27%).

Sub-Saharan African countries spent an average of 0.3% of their GDP on science and technology on in 2007. This represents an increase from US$1.8 billion in 2002 to US$2.8 billion in 2007, a 50% increase in spending.

Potential Additions
At the World Conference held in Jomtien (Thailand) in 1990, delegates from 155 countries and representatives of some 150 organizations committed to promoting universal primary education and radically reducing illiteracy before the end of the decade. The World Education Forum, held ten years later in Dakar (Senegal), provided the opportunity to reiterate and reinforce this commitment for universal primary education. That initiative contributed to having education placed at the heart of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 with their aim of achieving universal schooling (MDG2) and eliminating gender disparities, especially in primary and secondary education (MDG3).

Since the World Education Forum in Dakar (2000), considerable efforts have been made to respond to these new demographic challenges in terms of education. The amount of funds raised has been decisive. Between 1999 and 2010, public spending on education as a percentage of gross national product (GNP) increased by 5% per year in sub-Saharan Africa, with major variations between countries, with percentages varying from 1.8% in Cameroon to over 6% in Burundi. Today, governments in sub-Saharan Africa spend on average 18% of their total budget on education, against 15% in the rest of the world.

In the years immediately after the Dakar Forum, the efforts made by States towards achieving EFA produced spectacular results in sub-Saharan Africa. The greatest advance was in access to primary education, which governments had made their absolute priority. The number of children in primary school in sub-Saharan Africa thus rose from 82 million in 1999 to 136.4 million in 2011. In Niger for example, the number of children entering school increased more than three and a half times between 1999 and 2011. In Ethiopia, over the same period, over 8.5 million more children were admitted to primary school. The net rate of first year access in sub-Saharan Africa has thus risen by 19 points in 12 years, from 58% in 1999 to 77% in 2011. Despite the considerable efforts, the latest available data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics estimates that, for 2012, there were still 57.8 million children who were not in school. Of these, 29.6 million were in sub-Saharan Africa alone, a figure which has not changed for several years.

Many sub-Saharan countries have notably included the first year of secondary school in basic education. In Rwanda, for example, the first year of secondary school was attached to primary education in 2009, which significantly increased the number of pupils enrolled at this level of education. In 2012 the primary completion rate (PCR) – which measures the proportion of children reaching the final year of primary school – was 70%, meaning that more than three out of ten children entering primary school do not reach the final primary year.

A joint study by the World Bank and AFD carried out by Alain Mingat, Blandine Ledoux and Ramahatra Rakotomalala sought to anticipate the pressures that would be brought to bear on post-primary teaching. The study puts it this way: “In the reference year ''(2005), our sample of 33 countries in sub-Saharan Africa had 14.9 million pupils enrolled in the first year of secondary school. If the rate of completion of the primary stage reaches 95% by 2020 with levels of transition from primary to the first year of secondary maintained at their current level in each country, the first year of secondary school would have 37.2 million pupils in 2020, or 2.5 times the current number. If all the pupils finishing primary school could continue with their education, the number of pupils in the first year of secondary school would reach 62.9 million by 2020, a multiplication by 4.2 over the period.”''

Behind the regional averages, there are still enormous disparities between the countries, and even between the different zones and regions within countries, which means that it is not possible to “[…] identify conditions that apply uniformly to education across the different countries of sub-Saharan Africa.”

While some countries have lower demographic growth, others enjoy a more satisfactory level of school enrolment. Only a few countries are falling seriously behind in education at the same time as having to address a steady growth in their school-age population: Niger, Eritrea, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Uganda and to a lesser extent Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal and Malawi are particularly affected by this dual constraint. The EFA 2012 report highlights great disparities between the sub-Saharan African countries: the percentage of children excluded from primary school is only 7% in Gabon and 14% in Congo compared to over 55% in Burkina Faso and Niger. The gap in terms of the proportion of those excluded from the first year of middle school is even wider, with 6% in Gabon compared to 68% in Burkina Faso and 73% in Niger.

The majority of out-of-school populations are to be found in countries where there is conflict or very weak governance. At the Dakar Forum, the 181 signatory countries of the Dakar Framework for Action identified armed conflict as well as internal instability within a country as “a major barrier towards attaining Education for All” (EFA) – education being one of the sectors to suffer most from the effects of armed conflict and political instability. In the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report, UNESCO pointed out that the countries touched by conflict showed a gross rate of secondary school admissions almost 30% lower than countries of equivalent revenue that were at peace. Conflicts also have an impact on the rate of literacy of the population. At the global level, the rate of literacy among adults in countries touched by conflict was 69% in 2010 compared to 85% in peaceful countries. Twenty States in sub-Saharan Africa have been touched by conflict since 1999. Those countries affected by armed conflict, such as Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are furthest from meeting the EFA goals and contain the majority of the unschooled inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in North Kivu, a region particularly affected by conflicts, for example, the likelihood of young people aged between 17 and 22 having had only two years of schooling was twice the national average.

Less than half the children in sub-Saharan Africa can neither read nor write: a quarter of primary school age children reach the fourth year without having acquired the basics and over a third do not reach the fourth year. [A]ccording to the 2010 EFA Global Monitoring Report, “millions of children are leaving school without having acquired basic skills. In some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, young adults with five years of education had a 40% probability of being illiterate”. The teacher training systems are generally not able to meet the quantitive and qualitative needs of training. In Chad, for example, only 35.5% of teachers are certified to teach.

ICT in Education
The development of individual computer technology has proved a major turning point in the implementation of projects dependent on technology use, and calls for the acquisition of computer skills first by teachers and then by pupils. Between 1990 and 2000, multiple actions were started in order to turn technologies into a lever for improving education in sub-Saharan Africa. Many initiatives focused on equipping schools with computer hardware. A number of NGOs contributed, on varying scales, to bringing computer hardware into Africa, such as groups like Computer Aid International, Digital Links, SchoolNet Africa and World Computer Exchange. Sometimes with backing from cooperation agencies or development agencies like USAID, the African Bank or the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, these individual initiatives grew without adequate coordination. States found it difficult to define their national strategies with regard to ICT in Education.

The American One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, launched in several African countries in 2005, aimed to equip schools with laptop computers at low cost. While the average price of an inexpensive personal computer was between US$ 200 and US$ 500, OLPC offered its ultraportable XO-1 computer at the price of US$ 100. This technological breakthrough marked an important step in potential access to ICT. OLPC became an institutional system: the programme was “bought” by governments, which then took responsibility for distribution to the schools. The underlying logic of the initiative was one of centralization, thus enabling the largescale distribution of the equipment. Almost 2 million teachers and pupils are now involved in the programme worldwide (http://one.laptop.org/) and more than 2.4 million computers have been delivered. Following on from OLPC, the Intel group launched Classmate PC, a similar programme also intended for pupils in developing countries. Though it has a smaller presence in sub-Saharan Africa than the OLPC project, Classmate PC has enabled laptop computers to be delivered to primary schools in the Seychelles and Kenya, particularly in rural areas. Also in Kenya, the CFSK (Computer for School in Kenya) project was started in 2002 with the aim of distributing computers to almost 9,000 schools.

The cross-fertilization of teaching models and tools has now broadened the potential of ICT within the educational framework. Certain technologies, perceived as outdated compared to more innovative technology, nonetheless remain very much embedded in local practice. Today they are undergoing a partial revival, thanks to the combination of different media that can be used in any single project. Despite its limited uses in teaching, radio is a medium that still has considerable reach in terms of its audience. Cheaper than a computer, it also has a cost-benefit ratio that makes it attractive to many project planners. Launched in 2008, the BBC Janala programme, offering English courses in a combination of different media, including lessons of a few minutes via mobile phone, received more than 85,000 calls per day in the weeks following the launch of the service. In 15 months, over 10 million calls (paid, but at a reduced price compared to a normal communication) were made, by over 3 million users. Television, a feature of very many households, is witnessing a revival in its educational uses, by being combined with other media. As part of the Bridge IT programme in Tanzania, short educational videos, also available on mobile phones, are broadcast on the classroom television so that all the pupils can take part collectively. The e-Schools’ Network in South Africa has also, since March 2013, been developing an educational project, the object of which is to exploit unused television frequencies. There are currently ten schools taking part in the project.

Another digital tool with multiple uses, the interactive whiteboard (IWB), is also being used in some schools in sub-Saharan Africa. At the end of the 2000s, the Education for All Network (REPTA), in partnership with the Worldwide Fund for Digital Solidarity (FSN) and, in France, the interministerial delegation for digital education in Africa (DIENA) made interactive whiteboards available to schools in Burkina Faso, Niger, Benin, Senegal and Mali, along with open content. The use of the IWB has had a positive effect on motivation, for pupils and teachers alike. However, their impact in terms of learning has been muted. This system marginalizes the direct participation of the pupils in favour of multi-media demonstrations initiated by the teacher.

Distance learning in higher education
The main initiatives based on the use of ICT and the Internet in education originally focused on distance learning at university level. Thus, the African Virtual University (AVU), set up by the World Bank in 1997, was originally conceived as an alternative to traditional teaching. When it became an intergovernmental agency in 2003, it was training 40,000 people, mostly on short programmes. It shifted its focus to teacher training and to integrating technology into higher education. The AVU has ten e-learning centres. The Agence universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF) has also, since 1999, set up around forty Frenchspeaking digital campuses, more than half of them in Africa. In these infrastructures, dedicated to technology and set up within the universities, the AUF offers access to over 80 first and masters degrees entirely by distance learning, about 30 of which are awarded by African institutions and created with its support. More recently, the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) phenomenon has grown up, first in the United States and then in Europe.

Potential update of existing text in article re: literacy: The rate of literacy has not improved enough to compensate for the effects of demographic growth. As a result, the number of illiterate adults has risen by 27% over the last 20 years, reaching 169 million in 2010. Thus, out of the 775 million illiterate adults in the world in 2010, more than one fifth were in sub-Saharan Africa – in other words, 20% of the adult population. The countries with the lowest levels of literacy in the world are also concentrated in this region. These include Niger (28.7%), Burkina Faso (28.7%), Mali (33.4%), Chad (35.4%) and Ethiopia (39%), where adult literacy rates are well below 50%. There are, however, certain exceptions, like Equatorial Guinea, with a literacy rate of 94%.