Johannesburg, South Africa
African public-private partnerships are fast-tracking education improvement from primary school to university, potentially levelling the playing field for millions of students worldwide.
In the face of electricity shortages and over-crowding, African public-private partnerships are integrating technology in education to enhance learning. Broadband supports tablets, laptops, and online courses to reach students with poor or no access to education, improve teacher training, and lower costs, according to a recent report by UNESCO.
For example, Africa’s e-learning market has doubled from 2011 to 2016, reaching $513 million, according to a report by market researchers Ambient Insights. South Africa is Africa’s largest e-learning market, along with Angola, Nigeria, and Tunisia. Meanwhile, Senegal, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe are posting 25% annual e-learning market growth.
“Africa is one the world’s most dynamic education markets. Public-private partnerships show best practices for using technology to reach marginalised students with technology that students use in their daily lives. Africa presents exciting business opportunities for education technology vendors and startups worldwide,” said Trixie LohMirmand, senior vice-president, for Exhibitions and Events Management at Dubai World Trade Centre, host of GITEX Technology Week.
Supporting technology investment in Africa, GITEX Technology Week will host the Africa Investment Forum, in partnership with Nigeria’s National Information Technology Development Authority. Over 20 African countries will show how technology can enhance verticals, support foreign direct investment in ICT, and drive economic growth.
The Rumie Initiative Shows Power of Affordable Tech
African education projects are seeing the power of partnerships with local and international NGOs. The Rumie Initiative, a Canada-based NGO, has produced the Rumie tablet that is in the hands of more than 3,000 children in Africa, including in Benin, Egypt, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.
“Rumie saw an opportunity to give disadvantaged students access to the kind of free digital learning materials that had been available only to affluent schools in the past,” said Tariq Fancy, the founder and executive director of The Rumie Initiative, and one of dozens of educational luminaries speaking at GITEX’s Education Vertical Days conference programme.
The affordable Rumie tablet is pre-loaded with $5,000 worth of crowdsourced educational software and textbooks, with the impact of every dollar spent delivering 100 times the impact.
“Tablets can be sourced and distributed cheaply, the cloud provides low costs for storage, and crowd-sourced content allows educators to provide students with the local resources that best meet their needs. Rumie is now untethering content from tablets so that any student with a mobile device can learn from anywhere at any time,” added Tariq Fancy.
