Surveying ICT use in education in Africa

I began my career exploring the uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in education in Ghana, Uganda and a number of other places in Africa in the late 1990s, and have continued to stay engaged with lots of passionate and innovative groups and people working with ICTs in various ways to help meet a variety of challenges related to education across the continent. Because of this history, and continued connections to lots of folks doing related cool stuff, I am from time to time asked:
 

 
Periodically one comes across press reports asking general questions of this sort, such as this one from Germany's Deutsche Welle news service: Can tech help solve some of Africa's education problems? Of course, 'Africa' is a rather large place. Related generalizations (while catnip for headline writers, especially those outside the continent) obviously can obscure as much as they illuminate, perpetuating certain stereotypes of Africa as a single, monolithic place with certain common characteristics.(Binyavanga Wainaina's satirical How To Write About Africa remains sadly spot on in too many instances.)

That said, while the impulse from some corners to refer to 'Africa' may be both unfortunate but nevertheless predictable, being asked this sort of question at least provides an opportunity to unpack this question in ways that are (hopefully) useful and interesting. The EduTech blog was conceived in part, and in a decidedly modest way, to help direct the gaze of some folks to some of the interesting questions and challenges being addressed in different ways in different communities in Africa related to ICT use in education by groups who are, along the way, coming up with some interesting answers and solutions.

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The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), the arm of the United Nations charged with collecting global data related to education (and some other sectors as well), recently came out with a report that provides some useful data that collectively can help outline the general shape of some of what is happening across the African continent when it comes to the availability and use of educational technologies. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Comparative Analysis of Basic e-Readiness in Schools is certainly not the first such report that has taken a continent-wide perspective, but it is notable in a number of regards -- not only because it is the most recent such effort, but also because it is intended as a precursor to more regular data, systematic data collection efforts going forward.
 
Written by Peter Wallet (with the assistance of Beatriz Valdes Melgar), the report presents data and related analysis from a survey co-sponsored by UIS, the Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS) and the Brazilian Regional Center for Studies on the Development of the Information Society (CETIC.br -- the group responsible for the annual Survey of ICT and Education in Brazil). The report notes that, unfortunately, "data on ICT in education in the region are sparse. Collecting more and better quality statistics will be a priority in the post-2015 development agenda given the growing role of ICT in education. In response, the UIS is working with countries to establish appropriate mechanisms to process and report data, and to better measure the impact of technology on the quality of education." With that caveat and announcement out of the way, the report then utilizes the UIS Guide to Measuring Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Education as a framework with which to examine what could be discovered about the existence of related national policies, data about learner-computer ratios, school electrification and connectivity, and ICT-related instruction and curricula in ways consistent with other regional reports that the UIS has published on Asia, Latin America and a number of Arab countries. (Here's a list of international surveys of this sort from UIS and others for anyone who might be interested, as well as some general information about efforts of this sort.)
 
Some selected highlights:

• UIS finds that the "most significant obstacle in measuring ICT in education in sub-Saharan Africa is the lack of systematic data collections", noting that a number of countries (e.g. Somalia, Benin, the DRC) reported that there was no systematic related data collection *at all* in their countries. UIS states that the existence of a data collection effort related to this topic (not surprisingly) often correlates with whether or not ICT use in education is considered a priority area of policy and investment interest in a country and that, generally speaking, "ICT use in education is at a particularly embryonic stage in the majority of countries in sub-Saharan Africa."
   
• Based on information from the African countries who reported information back to UIS (which, it is worth noting, focused on sub-Saharan Africa, plus Djibouti), UIS reports that, in general, "computers are more frequently available for secondary education (i.e. based on enrolment), which might reflect the tendency to prioritise ICT in secondary education curricula compared to primary education". While generally speaking very high, learner-computer ratios (LCR) vary widely, both within a given education system (in The Gambia for example, the LCR for upper secondary is 37:1, compared with 277:1 in primary education) as well as across countries. Upper secondary LCR in Madagascar is 500:1, while in Rwanda it is 40:1 (at both secondary and primary levels, a legacy of the One Laptop Per Child project there). In addition to Rwanda, the lowest LCRs recorded are in Mauritius (23:1 in primary and 19:1 in upper secondary) and Botswana (55:1 in primary, 17:1 in upper secondary). School computer labs are quite common in many countries.
   
• Internet connectivity for schools is also notably scarce, with a few very notable exceptions. Figures below 5% (and sometimes effectively 0%) in places like Niger and Liberia contrast with situations found in Botswana and Mauritius, where virtually all schools are connected. (An aside: It is worth noting that, everywhere schools are connected, sufficient bandwidth can be a big issue.)
   
• One big constraint on the use of ICTs in education in many countries is basic access to sufficient electricity. Across many countries (e.g. Uganda, Cameroon, the DRC), fewer than one in twenty schools have electricity, although 75% of primary schools in countries such as Botswana and South Africa have electricity, as do all primary schools in places like the Seychelles and Mauritius (the clear outlier in most categories here).

The UIS paper concludes by noting that "Collecting more and better quality statistics from sub-Saharan Africa will be a priority in the post-2015 development agenda as ICT is expected to play an increasing role in future education goals.... Understanding that ICT resource inputs alone are inadequate for understanding the impacts of ICT on student outcomes, additional data on usage are required – more specifically data on how, when, how much and where teachers and pupils use ICT." (I might add why to this list of interrogatives as well.)
 
Congratulations to the team at UIS that is taking the lead on these activities, which will help set a baseline against which related future developments across Africa can be measured.
   
The UIS survey data collection initiative was not the first survey of technology use in education across Africa, of course:

• Back in 2007 when I was with the World Bank's infoDev program, we published two volumes of results from 53 country-level surveys of what was happening in each country in Africa and a more general synthesis of these findings. The information collected varied a great deal in comprehensiveness in quality, but at least it was a start. Indeed, we wrote at the time that, "This Survey of ICT and Education in Africa seeks to gather together in a single resource the most relevant and useful information on ICT in education activities in Africa. We hope that this publication is a first step in a larger, on-going, systematic, coordinated initiative to track developments in technology use in the education sector to help inform a wide variety of stakeholders interested in the topic as they seek solutions to larger, more fundamental educational and development challenges in the years ahead." (A subsequent World Bank report, eTransform Africa, extended this initial work.)
     
• eLearning Africa, the annual conference which has for many years been an epicenter of information sharing on ICT use in education on a continent-wide basis (African Brains has been attempting to do something similar), publishes a very useful eLearning Africa Report, which is described as "a yearly snapshot of progress and perspectives in the field of technology-enabled learning across the continent. Combining news, features, interviews, literature, survey results and [...] an extensive reference section, it is the most comprehensive guide there is to the facts, experiences and opinions that lie behind ICT4E and ICT4D developments today." (Here are direct links to the reports in 2015; 2014; 2013; and 2012.)
     
• There can be no denying the explosive growth of mobile phones across Africa over the past decade -- something which is not expected to slow down any time soon. To what extent might these sorts of devices be relevant to discussions related to education? UNESCO has produced two useful related publications, documenting programs and activities related to Mobile Learning for Teachers in Africa and the Middle East as well as a more general volume, Turning on Mobile Learning in Africa and the Middle East.
     
• The database on educational technology programs maintained by R4D's Center for Education Innovations (recently profiled on the EduTech blog) contains information on 73 projects across the continent.
     
• Some quick history, and some other useful sources of information: For what it's worth, around the dawn of the new millennium, a number of efforts -- including a series of papers on edtech in Africa supported by the World Bank and as part of Dfid's Imfundo research programme -- helped provide some of the earliest systematic documentation around ICT/education projects and issues not limited to a single country. Schoolnet Africa's Africa Education Knowledge Warehouse was for many years a go-to source of related information. The Commonwealth of Learning and SAIDE have also been notable groups documenting ICT/education efforts across the continent, especially related to distance learning, as have organizations like GeSCI and IICBA. The NEPAD e-Schools Initiative was one early attempt at a multi-country project across countries in Africa, as was the African Virtual University, which has emerged from a number of pivots and incarnations as an innovative actor exploring ICT use in education in various ways with partners across the continent.

 
While  initial efforts related to technology use in education in many African countries were supported (and indeed instigated) by outside donors, NGOs and funders, it is notable that today there are increasing numbers of programs conceived locally and led by local groups. While in many cases still small and facing many challenges (related to access to capital, for example, and sometimes cultural perceptions around entrepreneurship), there are dynamic start-up scenes emerging in many spots in Africa ( SmartMonkeyTV is one place to find interviews with participants in some of them), with innovative, passionate and talented people exploring edtech-related business ideas that are closely attuned to local market needs and realities. Informed by local know-how and experience, many of these projects have benefitted from learning from lessons from good (and bad) practices in other parts of the world, and I would not at all be surprised if many of the approaches and 'solutions' that emerge as a result of innovations from such groups and things like MakerFaire Africa help to suggest ways forward for their counterparts in other parts of the world while, more importantly, improving things in noteworthy and measurable ways much closer to home.
 
 
You may also be interested in the following EduTech blog posts:

• A new wave of educational efforts across Africa exploring the use of ICTs
• eLearning, Africa, and ... China?
• An update on the use of e-readers in Africa
• eTransform Africa
• Evaluating the evaluating of the Millennium Villages Project
• A few myths and misconceptions about digital teaching and learning materials in Africa
• Education & Technology in Africa: Creating Takers ... or Makers?
• Educational technology and innovation at the edges

 
Note: The image used at the top of this blog post of a Verner compass ("I have a better sense of where things are today, but the more important question is: Where are things headed?") comes from Ted Brink via Wikimedia Commons and is used according to the terms of its Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.