eLearning and Inclusion

Proper training opportunities for teachers are crucial in any educational system.

What role can eLearning play to help deliver efficient teacher training? At eLearning Africa, the MKFC Stockholm College (Sweden) in cooperation with the National Africa Foundation (Ghana) will introduce an exciting way to provide teacher training in order to help them to support Africa’s next generation. Their approach aims to implement global best practice into the curricula and at the same time to take local needs into account.
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Macha is an area in the rural southern province of Zambia which has experienced tremendous developments following the implementation of a fully networked information technology set-up “in the bush”. Implementing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) there has been a real challenge, says Gertjan van Stam, who has been working in the village since 2004. In Macha, he is currently the Technical Director of LinkNet, an organisation that provides for cost-based building, operations and maintenance of targeted and tailored communications infrastructure and services for special interest groups in rural areas of Zambia. In 2006 we heard from the Macha project for the first time, when Gertjan sent a letter to eLearning Africa. Now Brenda Zulu, eLearning Africa correspondent in Zambia, has followed up with him to see what communications have done for the rural community and how many local people have benefited from the new technologies.
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Solar panels at
Mwange

Francis Numbi, a Congolese refugee, lives in the Mwange refugee camp in northern Zambia, 95 miles from the capital, Lusaka. He designs lessons and teaches classes in basic computer skills for the refugee community. Classes meet twice each week with two people per computer. Numbi, who is teaching himself programming in his spare-time, has also provided the camp network with its own e-mail and chat programs. A story by Brenda Zulu, Zambia…
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Shelter for Africa, situated in Hamburg, Germany, is a non-governmental organisation that carries out non-for-profit projects for the people of the Republic of Sierra Leone in West Africa. The foundation is currently in the process of establishing a new radio station in Freetown - “Culture Radio” - to provide distance education programmes for people who would otherwise not be able to receive educational support. Young girls and boys without school education and their families are addressed, as well as school dropouts and young illiterate adults.
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Ms. Abishag W. Waugombe, a retired Kenyan teacher, knows a lot about the needs and necessities of the elderly people in her community. Long committed to community work, she and her friends have made use of the Internet in a rather unique way. eLA’s Nina Wittrock spoke with Ms. Waugombe about her experience and future plans regarding eLearning, story telling, and the delivery of cultural memory.
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Over 50 percent of the world's 6000 languages are endangered claims the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). According to the organization’s statistics, 96 percent of the world's 6000 languages are spoken by four percent of the world's population; ninety percent of the world's languages are not represented on the Internet; and one language disappears on average every two weeks.

The languages of African, eighty percent of which are not written, are particularly threatened. The African Languages Technology Initiative (Alt-i) seeks to apply modern Information and Communication Technologies to help ameliorate this situation, seeing them as a way to preserve endangered languages as well as to help confront the problem of literacy in Africa. eLA news editor Nina Wittrock spoke to Dr. Tunde Adegbola, the Executive Director of Alt-i.
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