Browsing: Education

Already ranking top 10 globally on AI usage, Egypt is inviting players in the emerging tech to explore best use…

Tackling poverty in Africa remains one of the primary goals of policymakers and institutions globally, including the World Bank. As…

Across Africa, there is still very limited access to education. Even when accessible, there is a huge discrepancy in the…

There is a debt crisis in Africa as countries struggle to repay international loans.  According to the World Bank, nine…

DRC Joins the Organisation of Southern Cooperation after depositing the Instrument of Acceptance Secretary-General Manssour Bin Mussallam received the Instrument…

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered the global education landscape. Consequently, it pushed educators to innovate rapidly and adapt to new modes of teaching and learning. In Southern Africa, the pandemic prompted a swift shift towards blended learning. This involved a combination of in-person and online education, as schools and universities temporarily closed their physical doors. The need to ensure continuity in education while minimizing the risks of virus transmission drove this unprecedented change in the education sector. Among the various approaches adopted during this period, e-learning emerged as a powerful tool with the potential to revolutionize education in Southern Africa. As such, the region’s education sector can harness the power of gamification to shape a brighter future for its students.

Recognizing the vital role of education, students and their families across sub-Saharan Africa have started using educational technologies to supplement…

TaRL is a unique intervention for accelerated learning that supports children who would have otherwise been left behind to learn and thrive. Pioneered by Pratham, an Indian NGO, the approach that has now been piloted in several African countries, including Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and Zambia, has revealed that learning outcomes improved with three months of accelerated learning focused on foundational skills through the support of TaRL Africa.  

TaRL evaluates children using a simple assessment tool and then groups them according to learning level rather than age or grade. Each group is taught using appropriate fun/play activities and materials, starting from what the child already knows. In Nigeria, for instance, the percentage of children who could read a simple English word increased by 30 percentage points after only 114 hours (on average) of participating in a TaRL pilot. 

Schools can ensure that children are never too far behind by targeting teaching to what learners already know. TaRL has provided evidence that by relieving the constraint of poorly targeted instruction, children’s learning can improve significantly.  

The National Association of School Governing Bodies’ general secretary, Matakanye Matakanye, told SowetanLIVE during an interview that many teachers were unemployed and the government should prioritize them over foreign teachers.

Matakanye also accused the government of failing to create a strong local capacity for specialist teachers.

“There are lots and lots of university graduates who are not working and we don’t get the department’s logic of taking people from outside our country when our people are not working. If this was happening five or 10 years after democracy, it would be understandable. It is unacceptable that the department of basic education is still getting educators from Cuba and Zimbabwe after 26 years of democracy,” he said.

Meanwhile, according to the Rwanda Education Board (REB), Rwanda is set to receive close to 500 Zimbabwean teachers by September this year. The teachers will be placed in polytechnics and higher learning institutions.

Due to the pandemic, the topic of innovation in education has never been more crucial. 

While most developed countries moved their classes online with ease, many developing countries have had a hard time adapting to the home-school model due to a lack of infrastructure and the high cost of data.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 91.3% of the world’s learning population was impacted by global shutdowns brought about by the pandemic.  

This means that about 1.5 billion students were not in school, a situation that largely impacted developing nations, a lot of which are in Africa.