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NEPAD Teacher Training request

Tim Unwin

Imfundo

There are nevertheless African-wide agendas and initiatives with which Imfundo has also sought to engage.  In particular, we have been eager to identify ways in which we might be able to support the difficult challenges facing NEPAD's e-Africa Commission.  Many of you will be aware of their ambitious e-schools initiative (see for example http://www.unicttaskforce.org/community/documents/55462020_UNICT%20TF%20%20NEPAD%20e-schools%20and%20MDGs.doc), and their interests in ensuring that teachers are appropriate trained to take advantage of the ICT facilities being introduced in African schools.

I spoke again on Tuesday with Henry Chasia (Executive Deputy Chairperson of NEPAD's e-Africa Commission), who will be well known to many of you, and he reiterated his interests in Imfundo's partnerships contributing to this work.  Knowing our concerns to ensure that teachers are indeed trained in the appropriate use of ICT for education he asked whether Imfundo might be able to help in this area.  This would indeed seem to be an area where we could indeed add value to the many ongoing processes in this field.  Many of our partners have considerable expertise as well as resources that they already use for training teachers, and it would be good to find ways of making the best of these available more widely across Africa (including in French and Portuguese speaking areas).

Our notion is still rather vague, but I am writing to all of our partners (together with some people with whom we are in ongoing partnership discussion) at this early stage to identify those who would be interested in contributing to such an initiative.  If there is sufficient interest and support from partners, I will get back to Henry Chasia, and let him know that this is indeed a venture that we would be interested in taking forward.  In essence what I have in mind is that we might undertake the following together with our partners:

Identification of the key elements that should be included in any ICT training course for teachers in Africa (this goes well beyond many existing programme which often provide only an introduction to basic Office packages, be they Microsoft or Open Source) Preparation of a document on good practice in such usage (this would be a short practical document that would outline the key principles that we believe should be adopted in any such training course)

Much good material already exists, and many of our partners already make such materials available.  A third stage in this exercise could be the collation of a package of training materials that could then be made available across Africa to any institution that would like to make use of them.  We might even go further than this and identify areas where such material is lacking, and explore ways of assisting with the development of locally based resources.

As will be clear, this is very much a first exploratory enquiry, and we are of course aware of a number of other on-going initiatives in the field.  However, if you feel that there is any value in Imfundo proceeding down these lines, do please let me know by October 15th so that I can get back to NEPAD with an answer.