AFRICA
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Technology now seen as key to HE, but challenges persist

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a wake-up call and an opportunity to put technology at the heart of policies and plans for improving higher education in Africa, according to the findings of a continent-wide survey conducted by the eLearning Africa and EdTech Hub networks.

The survey results were based on responses from 1,650 respondents made up of teachers, lecturers, professors and education technology professionals from 52 African countries.

Released on 16 September, the survey, titled The Effect of COVID-19 on Education in Africa and its Implications for the Use of Technology, identified lack of access to technology as the biggest barrier to learning in Africa since schools and universities were closed as a result of the pandemic. Almost 100% of the survey’s respondents reported closure of all educational institutions in their countries.

Emphasising the serious repercussions of the closures for students, the report highlights the widespread absence of distance learning infrastructure in Africa in terms of lack of reliable power supply and affordable internet connectivity. Also lacking are appropriate learning materials, such as books, television sets and internet-enabled devices.

According to the latest in the series of Global Digital Reports titled Digital 2020: Global digital overview (Frame 13), Africa’s internet penetration stands at 34% in a population of 1.2 billion people.

Challenges to effective reach

It is against this background that the COVID-19 pandemic presented a major challenge to Africa’s education sector in comparison to other global regions. “Even when the need for distance learning was clear from the outset of the pandemic, achieving effective reach to students, especially those in rural areas, was more complex in most countries,” noted the report.

Subsequently, with very little warning, the whole approach to in-person learning became untenable but with little planned to replace it on a large scale.

According to the report, whereas most governments provided rudimentary distance learning to primary and secondary education students through radio and television programmes, universities were left to their own devices and their responses varied according to their resources and resourcefulness.

From the outset of the closures of educational institutions, universities were thought to be proactive in planning and reducing the impact of COVID-19 on their students. The view that higher education is still far better placed to cope with adverse academic issues is widespread. Only 6% of survey respondents thought it was likely to be the most disadvantaged sector.

But, in the midst of the shutdown, individual universities reacted differently, depending on their resources, access to technology, whether they were public or private, urban or rural, and depending on the social mobility of their students.

Respondents from Ethiopia and Eritrea highlighted the wide technological gap between urban and rural areas, with poor communication infrastructure emerging as the key barrier to distance learning.

A new reality

According to Albert Nsengiyumva, the executive secretary of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, or ADEA, COVID-19 triggered a new reality which deepened inequality and exclusion in African education systems.

“Today, more than ever before, we need to adapt as quickly as possible to disasters and emergencies and look for alternatives to advance education and training in Africa,” said Nsengiyumva.

Inadvertently, the difficult times of COVID-19 brought an opportunity for African governments to put an end to delays in making a fundamental commitment to technology. According to the report, irrespective of COVID-19, technology is the key to the rapid expansion of education.

While the message about the need for investment in education and technology had in the past lacked urgency, the report said many people are starting to see COVID-19 as a sort of shot in the arm to deliver new impetus to plans for a technologically transformed continent.

About 85% of the survey’s respondents said they anticipated the pandemic would boost the use of technology in education and believed that its use would be more widespread as a result of the crisis.

As Rebecca Stromeyer, the director of e-Learning Africa, notes, the COVID-19 crisis has shown how important technology now is to education.

Increase in inequality and disadvantage

But, whereas the pandemic may have unexpectedly presented opportunities to improve the uses of and access to technologies in learning, the new report argues that more online learning is still likely to increase inequality and disadvantage those students from poor households. Based on experiences from the crisis, 74% of respondents said technological advances were likely to create wide digital learning disparities between urban and rural areas.

“The poor and disadvantaged students will be greatly affected compared to their more privileged peers,” states the report.

Whereas access to affordable electricity is a basic requirement for the development of digital distance learning, many parts of Africa, particularly rural areas, do not have a reliable power supply. “For instance in Zambia, only 3% of people in rural areas have access to the national grid for electricity,” notes the report.

While poor communications infrastructure was identified as a key problem for accessing distance education, the report classifies connectivity as one the biggest barriers to using technology effectively for education, especially during the crisis. “Building sufficient masts for communication has been expensive, as reflected in the cost of data,” notes the report.

But the main worry is that, even if governments were to install the necessary infrastructure to achieve reliable electricity power supply and internet connectivity, many poor students lack personal learning devices such as laptops and smartphones, nor can they afford regular data costs.

According to Digital Global Overview, the average ownership of a smart device among internet users aged 16 to 64 stands at 5% in Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.

Amid concerns that the current crisis might ultimately increase the digital divide in education, eLearning Africa has urged schools, universities and other institutions of learning not to be discouraged about the lack of state-of the-art digital platforms.

“There should be willingness to experiment and to find ways to work with whatever technology students have, including SMS and WhatsApp,” notes the report. The report also identified Moodle, Zoom and Google Classroom as some of the enabling software teaching tools most African universities used to reach students.

Respondents recommended that African governments start scrapping taxes on data costs and digital devices, and ask telecommunication operators to lower prices.