ICT for Development
More networking of African IT specialists with Europe and joint building of advanced training materials – this is what a new partnership of GIZ’s ict@innovation programme with the Europe-wide ‘Free Technology Academy’ (FTA) is all about. ict@innovation is an African capacity building programme which supports small and medium ICT enterprises (IT-SME) to create a business model with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and aims to encourage the growth of African ICT industries.
An eLearning based “European Customs Consultant” course has been successfully tested as part of the project “Customs consultancy for the commercial sector in Serbia”. The overall aim of the project is to place the Serbian commercial sector in a position to effectively apply both the customs provisions in force as well as those that will undergo reform in the future.
With over 1400 participants at eLearning Africa this conference is becoming more and more THE event on ICT for Development in Africa. After visiting some of the workshops I have the impression that there is a growing interest on
costs of using ICT for Education:
Richard John Self, University of Derby, UK, gave an interesting presentation on the costs of eLearning provision in higher education. He started an own research on costs of eLearning after he had discovered that there were only little published quantitative research on this subject.
In his case study he concluded that
In his ongoing research he is now going to create a Total Cost of Ownership evaluation model The following graphic gives a first impression on potential costs for eLearning (costs in working hours):
Most of the effort for an eLearning project is needed for preparation and local adaption of course content. This is one reason why we (GTZ) are also supporting the Open Educational Resource (OER) projects, e.g. http://free.uwc.ac.za/ripmixlearners/
Of course, there were many other important aspects highlighted at the eLearning Africa conference. In addition to the interesting presentations (not all of them…) I was happy to meet many “old friends” to discuss upcoming ICT issues. For me it became also apparent that the conference is approaching more and more “ICT for Development” issues.
A number of leading developers have left the OLPC initiative recently – probably due to Negropontes’ mismanagement. A look at Ivan Krstić post shows a number of staggering problems, e.g. the deployment problem:
“(…) now the company has half a million laptops in the wild, with no one even pretending to be officially in charge of deployment.”
Looks like OLPC will run into huge problems this year…
As prices of ICT hardware are decreasing, low-cost computing devices are spreading rapidly in schools, not just in industrialised countries, but increasingly in developing ones as well. There are many projects and programs currently underway that focus on the use of low-cost ICT devices for developing countries.
Only a few months ago the “One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Initiative” (originally a group at the Media Lab of MIT, now an independent organisation) developed the so-called “100$ Laptop” (or XO-Laptop). The main goal of OLPC is to introduce a low cost laptop that “is poised to empower and educate children through the use of technology, and connect the world’s next generation of thinkers.”
On this account GTZ conducted a pilot-test of the XO-Laptops in two Ethiopian schools. This report gives a first overview on possible use and impact of low-cost computing devices to poor people in developing countries.
Update (March 6): In the meantime also our partner company (eduvision) published its first implementation-report. Eduvision’s role in the project was to provide their solution for editable interactive textbooks as well as their educational consulting skills for a period of 3 month.
Januar 10, 2008 || Entwicklungshilfe:
Hewlett-Packard (HP) und die UN-Organisation für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur, UNESCO, werden in mehreren Bildungsprojekten zusammenarbeiten. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf dem Programm „Bildung für alle“ (Education for All) der UNESCO.
Im Rahmen dieser Bildungsinitiative soll das in Afrika bestehende Projekt „Brain Drain“ auf zusätzliche Gebiete, auch in Europa und Nahost, ausgedehnt werden. Um die Abwanderung hochqualifizierter Arbeitskräfte zu verhindern, unterstützen HP und die UNESCO seit 2006 Universitäten in Afrika beim Anschluss an globale Forschungsnetzwerke. Das Projekt, das vor fünf Jahren in Südosteuropa startete, stattet Universitäten mit fortschrittlicher Technologie (Grid Computing) aus. So können Top-Wissenschaftler einen Platz in der internationalen Forschung einnehmen und gleichzeitig die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung ihres Heimatlandes fördern.
Auch der „Leitfaden zum Computer-Recycling“ ist aus der Zusammenarbeit zwischen HP und der UNESCO entstanden. Er unterstützt vor Ort diejenigen, die sich an einer umweltgerechten Entsorgung von Elektronikschrott beteiligen, insbesondere in Entwicklungsländern.
This is my first try of real-time blogging: I’m sitting in a session on “How blogs and wikis are being used to stimulate reflective practice and collaborative learning in universities and other colleges of higher education”. This session is part of the online educa congress in Berlin, one of the biggest eLearning events in Germany, and fortunately they offer a good wireless broadband connection to the internet 
[Read more →]
I am glad to see the blog is already this vibrant. For my first post I want to provide some interesting articles:
Many articles are about the conference in Rwanda lately. Anybody has more news about it?
eLearning in Africa (World Bank Photo Collection)
From 28th to 30th of May, 2007 the German implementing organisations, the German Development Service (DED), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) and InWEnt Capacity Building took part at the 2nd eLearning Africa in Nairobi and provided information on the latest developments, strategies and solutions for expanding eLearning capacity in partner countries.
Under the motto “Capacity Development for eLearning in Africa”, German organisations showcased how project work has managed to rise to the challenges of eLearning.
The conference attracted over 3000 participants and 250 Speakers in over 50 sessions and 14 workshops. The number of participants easily doubled compared to the first conference and thus indicated the increasing interest in ICT-supported education of many African countries.
Post Conference Report: http://www.elearning-africa.com/pdf/report/postreport_eLA2007_small.pdf
Contact: beate.dippmar@gtz.de
Mark Fleeton, Development Gateway Foundation
In October, GTZ received representatives of the World Banks multi-donor facility nfoDev and the Development Gateway Foundation (DGF), both international stakeholders in ICT4D. The presentations aimed to promote ICT4D as cross-sectoral theme for sustainable development. Michael Trucano, education specialist at infoDev, presented the brand new survey “ICT and Education in Africa”. CEO of the Development Gateway Foundation (DGF), Mark Fleeton, explained how ICTs could support donors to to harmonize and improve its aid effectiveness.
The infoDev survey (http://www.infodev.org/en/Project.7.html) documents technology use in the education sector of all 53 African countries. Summing up, the survey identifies a marked shift form projects to policies, which implies that more and more African governments commit themselves to policies promoting ICT in education. In addition, Michael Trucano presented a new toolkit (http://ictinedtoolkit.org/usere/login.php), which aims to assist education policy makers, planners and practitioners in the process of harnessing the potential of ICT to meet educational goals and targets efficiently and effectively.
In the second presentation, Mark Fleeton gave a brief introduction to working areas and methods of the Development Gateway Foundation, which provides internet platforms and software solutions to make aid and development efforts more effective. The DGF offers a wide range of activities mainly for donors, like online communities and an independent aggregator of government tender information worldwide (http://www.dgmarket.com/). This database is particularly interesting for third-arty business publishing more than 32.000 tenders with an estimates value of $ 700 billions. In development countries, DGF delivers web-related services for local needs by running so called country gateways. For policy makers DGF has developed a software (http://amp.developmentgateway.org/) tracking and organizing the international aid flow, currently only used by the Bolivian government.
Further Information:
http://www.infodev.org
http://www.developmentgateway.org/
http://aida.developmentgateway.org/
Child balancing $100 Laptop on his head (ABC-News)
The $100 laptop, first announced at the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, is becoming a reality. The “One Laptop Per Child”(OLPC) education project has developed the innovative low cost laptop as a learning device for school children in low income countries.
Small scale trials of the new technology and education concept are already underway in schools in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Brazil and Rwanda. The first large scale roll-outs are expected to commence before the end of the year. Devices will be priced at around $175 but prices are expected to fall as the project progresses.
IT-Experts from the German-Ethiopian “Engineering Capacity Building Programme” (ECBP) support the test of 40 laptops (beta 4) at an Ethiopian school. Today already it is clear that a successful large scale roll-out will involve a complex package of tasks reaching from the development of teaching concepts to training for teachers and support technicians and the logistics of deployment.
Further information: http://laptop.org
http://wiki.laptop.org/go
http://www.ecbp.biz/about/one.html
Contact: thomas.rolf@gtz.de
e-agriculture EU Information Society African ingenuity (Gadgets) ICT4D-feed WB-Blog on eEducation
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Posted by Balthas Seibold