SAIDE joins UNESCO in Kampala and Nairobi

In March and April 2000, Neil Butcher of SAIDE was afforded a unique opportunity to join two UNESCO functions in East Africa. The first trip was to Kampala, Uganda, to help facilitate a workshop on designing course materials for distance education programmes. This workshop, which ran over four days from the 29th March to the 1st April, involved delegates from all over East and Southern Africa. In a separate visit to Nairobi, Neil participated in the launch of the African Network for Innovation in Higher Education (ANIHE).

Of particular interest on the visit to Uganda was an opportunity to visit the main campus of Makerere University, where delegates visited the Distance Education Centre there and also saw the local African Virtual University site in partial operation. (Interestingly, the site was described by one of the locals as ‘a baby that eats all the food so that there is none left for the other children’.)

At the workshop, Neil was asked to facilitate sessions on use of educational technology and on costing course design and development. The sessions provided an ideal opportunity for sharing our experiences, but more importantly for learning more about the remarkable achievements many people reach under extremely difficult circumstances.

Overall, the workshop left a sense of many possibilities, but also a feeling that distance education suffers many severe problems in its implementation in resource-scarce environments. In particular, the following trends appear to pose serious barriers to successful implementation of distance education in African contexts:

• Face-to-face tutorial support is seen to be critical to learner success, but often too expensive to implement;

• There are few reliable and sustainable strategies for making ongoing investments in course materials design and development;

• Professional development for educational and administrative staff members is sporadic and limited, resulting in insufficient skills amongst personnel to sustain distance education systems;

• Administrative systems either do not exist or are highly underdeveloped;

• Even modest course fees are beyond the reach of many potential learners;

• Innovation in distance education relies heavily on unsustainable sources of funding, particularly donor funding;

• National communication systems (roads, telecommunications, postal systems) are not sufficiently reliable or pervasive to meet the requirements of distance education provision.

Clearly, traditional models of distance education are not meeting the expectation they raised, so the serious challenge is to evolve newer, more relevant models of large-scale educational provision.

In a separate visit to Nairobi, Neil was invited to participate in the launch of the African Network for Innovation in Higher Education (ANIHE). On October 25, 1999, the Director-General of UNESCO, the Rector of the United Nations University and the Rector of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia set up the Global University Network for Innovation (GUINI) and subsequently directed that regional networks be established as affiliates of GUINI.

In response to this directive, an African regional meeting was convened in Nairobi, Kenya between the 13th and 15th of April, 2000, to set up ANIHE. The meeting was convened by the UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Africa (BREDA) with the cooperation of the Division of Higher Education, UNESCO, Paris, and attended by representatives of BREDA, United Nations University (UNU), UNESCO International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa (IICBA), UNESCO Chairholder in Higher Education, UNESCO Senior Education Adviser in Pretoria, Directors of Centres for Teaching, Learning and Research in Higher Education in Africa, and representatives of other interest groups.

At the meeting, Articles of Formation for ANIHE were drafted and an interim president elected (Prof. Okebukola from Lagos State University in Nigeria). In addition, various initial projects for the Network were proposed:

1. Regional workshops on research capacity building;
2. Preparation of a directory of higher education research in Africa;
3. Africanizing the content and presentation of the AVU;
4. Development of educational technology strategies for higher education institutions;
5. Development of higher education institutions in effective financial planning for educational courses and programmes;
6. Regional workshops on training of trainers in university research in Africa;
7. Research and development, focusing on commercialization of university research in Africa;
8. Development of universities and higher education institutions in effective management and resourcing of their academic and enterprise functions.

SAIDE looks forward to maintaining an ongoing involvement with this exciting initiative.