Leaders urged to work towards digital knowledge parity

African leaders were urged to work towards 'digital parity' so as to enable the continent’s inhabitants to participate in and be represented as equals in both the digital and material worlds.

Professor Laura Czerniewicz, director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said in terms of the power of online tools impacting upon learning and skills development, African countries were unequal partners in the globe.

Speaking at the 13th International Conference and Exhibition on ICT for Education, Training and Skills Development in Kigali, Rwanda, on 28 September, Czerniewicz said African governments should rethink online power dynamics.

She added that her thesis on digital technology would not make much impact in an environment of poor participation, but she pointed out that online activity did shape and augment what happened in the physical world. She advised African leaders to work towards digital parity, so as to enable people to participate in and be represented as equals in the inextricably interconnected virtual and material worlds.

“In a knowledge society, what counts as valid, legitimate knowledge is increasingly determined online; that means that if it is not online, it does not exist,” Czerniewicz said.

She argued that the material world was being produced and reinforced by online language, content and complex scientific algorithms – and not just through basic e-learning.

Absence of African languages

Czerniewicz said the African worldview – which included identity, traditional knowledge, ontology and other cultural values – was underrepresented on the web, but of greater concern was the “absence of African languages that would enable African people to obtain social justice in knowledge inequalities”.

Using data gleaned from W3Techs, an online firm that conducted surveys on language and technology use, Czerniewicz said the most common languages on the web, based on the content of the world’s top 10 million websites, were: English (53.4%), German (6.3%), Russian (6%), Spanish (4.9%), French (4.1%), Japanese (3.6%), Portuguese (2.6%), Italian (2.4%), Persian (2%), Chinese (1.8%), Polish (1.8%), Dutch/Flemish (1.3%), Turkish (1.2%) and Czech (1%).

According to W3Techs, last month English was the fastest growing content language, with 868 new websites, followed by Portuguese, with 69. Czerniewicz said English remained the most influential online language, as – apart from dominating content – 52% of all websites were currently in English.

In an interview with University World News, she added that no local African languages had any substantial content on the web.

“What we are witnessing today is massive digital knowledge inequalities that have strong structural foundations, which require close attention by educators and African policy-makers on behalf of those outside of networked flows,” said Czerniewicz.

Digital access

Also at the conference, Foster Ofosu, a capacity development specialist at the African Development Bank, said that while knowledge was a powerful tool in the acquisition of power, African leaders needed to increase and improve digital access. He accused them of stifling technological advances.

“African leaders know the opportunities that can be obtained through broadband communication networks, as well as the importance of a reliable power supply, but none of these key resources to e-learning are easily available in most parts of the continent,” he said.

Ofosu argued that if African leaders were serious about Agenda 2063 – the African Union’s master plan to transform the continent into a global powerhouse – the strategy should start with reliable power in every village and a broadband communication network in every marketplace, rather than the distribution of circulars and empty talk about how e-learning could eradicate poverty in Africa.

In a hard-hitting presentation on transforming Africa, he said it was impossible, with the current state of technology-assisted learning on the continent, to equip young African people with the knowledge and skills needed to uplift the continent from the chaos of poverty and under-development.

‘Stop making excuses and educate’

Another speaker, Maximilian Bankole Jarrett – senior special adviser of the Africa Progress Group – noted that Africa was a rich continent filled with poor people and African leaders had to stop making excuses and start using their massive extractive resources to educate millions of youths.

“You have failed to educate your people in the past. Try it again and, more so, do it now,” he told African leaders, especially those who had been accused of plundering public resources.

However, the road to the decolonisation of knowledge and acquisition of skills would not be easy. According to Czerniewicz, the problem extended to how digital technology experts coded and designed high-performance algorithms and other artificial intelligence formats.

Just like most of the knowledge in cyberspace, mathematical algorithms were not neutral, as they were designed with biases and assumptions that reflected existing beliefs and were built on existing educational practices, she added.

Drawing heavily on recent works about how artificial intelligence could develop prejudices such as racism and sexism, Czerniewicz argued that some algorithms could develop biases that already existed on the internet.

“Algorithms are engines of value that risk exacerbating and accelerating inequalities and privilege,” Czerniewicz told University World News.

She added that, with the emergence of the fourth industrial revolution, knowledge on high-performance algorithms, as well as the production of massive amounts of information, needed to be recast to ensure parity in participation, creation, visibility and contribution.

Consequently, efforts in African countries to achieve the total decolonisation of knowledge in cyberspace would require systematic policy and programmatic interventions geared towards growing content creation and coding presence, Czerniewicz said.