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Can Technology Save Africa?
20 July 2007
Newsweek
The town of Jinka, nestled in the green, rolling hills of southern Ethiopia, is a trading hub for the nine tribes of the Omo Valley. Eighty percent of Ethiopia’s students live in remote areas like this one, without electricity or running water. While Jinka may seem like a backwater, it’s at the forefront of a trend sweeping the continent, one that just might rescue Africa’s struggling education systems. To get a glimpse, visit the new Jinka High School. The place looks more like an abandoned summer camp; there are no flush toilets and only a few ramshackle desks. But there’s also a sparkling new computer lab and a gas-powered generator that runs the 42-inch plasma-screen TVs mounted at the front of a classroom. Every day, these screens broadcast lessons piped in from South Africa.
The school is part of a $100 million project Ethiopia embarked on three years ago with help from UNESCO, the World Bank and corporations like Cisco Systems. There are now 458 such schools around the country. Addis Ababa hopes they will help it compensate for extremely scarce resources. No matter that the TV tutorials are all in English and therefore hard for some students to follow. “We are poor; we don’t have teachers or lab equipment,” says Ethiopia’s acting minister of Education, Dessalegn Samuel, who argues that until his government can train and hire more teachers, TV tutoring is the only way to provide free, equal and quality education to all.
As Africa strives to pull itself out of grinding poverty, more and more countries are looking to technology to give them a leg up. The goal, supported by the United Nations and the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), is to get the continent IT-ready by next year, when a fiber-optic cable running alongside the east coast is scheduled for completion, bringing broadband access to 22 nations. NEPAD has an “e-schools” initiative that aims (too optimistically) to wire all 600,000 African high schools by the time the cable is up and running. But the moves have sparked a big debate over whether it makes sense to spend money on technology before teachers and textbooks.
Vladimir Kinelev, the director of the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education, argues that computers can’t solve the problems of a place where almost half a billion people live on less than $1 a day, and many lack clean drinking water. “When textbooks, chalk, water and teachers are in short supply, [high-tech] investments should not be a priority,” wrote UNESCO experts Wad Hadaka and Alexandra Draxier in a recent study. At least some Africans agree: David Siele, director of higher education in Kenya’s Ministry of Education, argues that “technology should not be the priority. The priority … should be to get kids into high school.”
But the majority of African leaders and some international experts see technology as a short cut into the Information Age. Nancy Ncube, a South African who is director of partnerships at NEPAD’s e-Africa Commission, says the new technology is a “long-term investment” that will help kids get the skills they need to find work. In South Africa, she notes, a lot of IT jobs are available, but “we are recruiting from outside our borders because we don’t have the people to fill them.” One of the leading advocates of technology in the classroom is Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based One Laptop Per Child. Through partners like Google and the U.N. Development Program, his nonprofit has held talks with Ethiopia and Nigeria to get them large numbers of his hand-cranked laptops, which cost less than $180 each. Rwanda alone is argeted to receive 2.2 million of them by 2010.
Negroponte says that training more teachers, buying more books and building more schools will take too much time to meet Africa’s needs. Michelle Selinger, global education strategist for Cisco Systems, agrees. “One laptop with a data projector can go a lot farther than a textbook,” she says. “It may not necessarily bring understanding, but it can bring quality content and great resources.” Computers are especially effective in countries with poorly qualified teachers, such as Ethiopia. Other countries are now experimenting with a variety of high-tech teaching aids. In Rwanda, some schools now boast Smart Boards--large touchscreen computers that allow students to interact with lessons by answering multiple-choice questions and so on. Kenya has invested in systems that link one hard drive to 10 monitors and keyboards. Outside corporations like Microsoft, Oracle and HP are providing thousands of new computers and lots of software.
Arguably, some of the high-tech innovations have started to pay off. In Nigeria, class enrollment has spiked in schools that offer computer training. Kenya hopes its new tech-savvy graduates will help transform the country into a global IT and outscourcing hub, says Bitange Ndemo, the country’s secretary of Information and Communications. Kenya’s nascent call-center business has grown from employing 200 people last year to 3,000 this year, and if the country could lower its reliance on expensive satellite connections, this number could increase dramatically.
In the meantime, educators like Menelik Asafah, Jinka High’s principal, are pushing ahead. Asafah can’t print out daily lesson plans because there is no paper and the printers have run out of ink. But he points out that his students are much better off than those in a neighboring village, which lacks any high-tech equipment at all. His school had only 37 graduates last year, but with the new plasma program online, he hopes to see that double this year. “At least everyone is getting an equal opportunity, he says. “But Africa still has a lot of catching up to do.”
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