| Newsweek Home » Education » College Guide |
 |
Can Technology Save Africa?
As Africa strives to pull itself out of grinding poverty, countries are looking to technology to give them a leg up in the race for quality education.
KAPLAN TOOLS |
Note: The 2008 NEWSWEEK-Kaplan College Guide incorrectly states that Amherst College will be closed from 2008 to 2012. It is Antioch College that is scheduled to close during that period. |
SPECIAL REPORT: GLOBAL EDUCATION |
Chapter 1: The Education Race |
Chapter 3: Vying for Influence |
Live Talk: College Admissions |
Join Pomona College's Dean of Admissions, Bruce Poch, for a Live Talk on Weds., August 15, at 1 p.m., on what colleges look for in new admits |
Aug. 20, 2007 - The town of Jinka, nestled in the green, rolling hills of southern Ethiopia, is a trading hub for the nine tribes of the Omo Valley. Eighty percent of Ethiopia’s students live in remote areas like this one, without electricity or running water. While Jinka may seem like a backwater, it’s at the forefront of a trend sweeping the continent, one that just might rescue Africa’s struggling education systems. To get a glimpse, visit the new Jinka High School. The place looks more like an abandoned summer camp; there are no flush toilets and only a few ramshackle desks. But there’s also a sparkling new computer lab and a gas-powered generator that runs the 42-inch plasma-screen TVs mounted at the front of a classroom. Every day, these screens broadcast lessons piped in from South Africa.
The school is part of a $100 million project Ethiopia embarked on three years ago with help from UNESCO, the World Bank and corporations like Cisco Systems. There are now 458 such schools around the country. Addis Ababa hopes they will help it compensate for extremely scarce resources. No matter that the TV tutorials are all in English and therefore hard for some students to follow. “We are poor; we don’t have teachers or lab equipment,” says Ethiopia’s acting minister of Education, Dessalegn Samuel, who argues that until his government can train and hire more teachers, TV tutoring is the only way to provide free, equal and quality education to all.
As Africa strives to pull itself out of grinding poverty, more and more countries are looking to technology to give them a leg up. The goal, supported by the United Nations and the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), is to get the continent IT-ready by next year, when a fiber-optic cable running alongside the east coast is scheduled for completion, bringing broadband access to 22 nations. NEPAD has an “e-schools” initiative that aims (too optimistically) to wire all 600,000 African high schools by the time the cable is up and running. But the moves have sparked a big debate over whether it makes sense to spend money on technology before teachers and textbooks.
Vladimir Kinelev, the director of the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education, argues that computers can’t solve the problems of a place where almost half a billion people live on less than $1 a day, and many lack clean drinking water. “When textbooks, chalk, water and teachers are in short supply, [high-tech] investments should not be a priority,” wrote UNESCO experts Wad Hadaka and Alexandra Draxier in a recent study. At least some Africans agree: David Siele, director of higher education in Kenya’s Ministry of Education, argues that “technology should not be the priority. The priority … should be to get kids into high school.”
| Rate this story | Low | High |
