africa

A small team from ATiT spent the week of 20th April in Freetown, Sierra Leone, working with the Sierra Leone Investment and Export Promotion Agency (SLIEPA) to prepare for the creation of a content driven web site and intranet, including the necessary training to operate the website in the future.

This service will target both companies from within Sierra Leone as well as potential foreign investors and will be used to help drive the economy forward by identifying international markets for products from Sierra Leone as well as finding investors to work with companies in Sierra Leone.

The site will be built using DRUPAL as the Content Management System and will be available in June 2009.

The Women's Dialogue is a 3 part series of virtual dialogues starting on 22 January 2009 featuring live interviews and participation of current and former female Heads of State including Madam Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and President Tarja Halonen interacting with a global audience of future leaders. The purpose of these dialogues is to produce recommendations and solutions on how to break down barriers to leadership which will be presented to the Women’s International Colloquium being held in Monrovia, Liberia March 7-8 2009.These dialogues are facilitated through the GDLN network of centres and are being produced by ATiT.

ATiT staff recently supported the 2nd African ICT Best Practices Forum held in Ouagadougou,Burkina Faso from 21-23 April. The objective of the event, which took place over 3 days, was to provide a practical way for government officials from across Africa to share their own specific experiences and demonstrate practical examples of successful technology solutions in their respective countries, ultimately to replicate them elsewhere. This Forum attracted about 320 delegates from 39 countries represented, for more information, visit the Forum web site at http://www.africanictbestpractices.net

A recent article by Mathy Vanbuel carried in the eLearning Africa News Portal puts forward his views as to why ICTs are crucial for the Continent's development. It traces the evolution from small scale pilot projects in different countries to large-scale implementation actions, with the potential to provide a basis for sustainable change. It highlights the fact that Africa is leading the world in finding ways to utilise mobile phones, wireless networking, solar energy and reusable energy sources, but also points out the need to be realistic given the many demands on Africa's limited resources. The forthcoming eLearning Africa conference, http://www.elearning-africa.com taking place 28-30 May in Accra, Ghana offers an important opportunity to further this discussion and more specifically to focus on the importance of ICT in education and training within this perspective.

To read the full article, visit the eLearning Africa News Portal.

The final workshop for the Health Informatics Project BEANISH took place in Gabarone on 13-14 March and brought together representatives from health authorities, ministries and universities in Ethiopia, Malawi, Botswana, Tanzania, South Africa, Mozambique and Norway to review the progress of this EU supported project and to discuss plans for the future. The purpose of BEANISH is to strengthen and extend an existing Europe-Africa collaborative network to support the application and sharing of IST application development so as to support cooperation, learning and innovation in mutually beneficial ways. In its 3 year lifetime, the project has taken significant strides in the right direction and large scale take-up of the applications developed by the network are now taking place in several countries. For more information, visit the BEANISH web site.

infoDev and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) have released a really useful second set of draft country reports from the on-going Survey of ICT and Education in Africa, a comprehensive study surveying the current landscape of ICT in education initiatives in Africa.

Together with the Kenya Institute of Education, the Nairobi University and BBC Worldwide Interactive Learning, ATiT is organising a workshop entitled “Producing and Publishing Media for Online Learning (part 1): The eLA Media Team Training Workshop” at the eLearning Africa conference. The workshop is intended for African participants only and takes place from the 28th till the 30th of May, 2007. Workshop participants will be guided by a team of experts while they actually try out what they have learnt during the two days of the eLearning Africa conference as they will form part of the conference media production team.

Sally Reynolds and Mathy Vanbuel, ATiT, were both involved in the eLearning Africa Conference in Addis (Ethiopia) from 24 till 26 May 2006. The conference attracted over 800 experts and decision makers from over 80 countries (but with a large majority from African countries) and certainly sparked a lot of enthusiasm with the attendees. More information and conclusions on the ICWE eLearning Africa website.