infoDev, Commonwealth of Learning release public report on NEPAD
e-Schools
Results from monitoring and evaluation activity point to challenges,
opportunities for multi-country African initiatives seeking to introduce
ICTs in the education sector
11 September 2007 | Washington, DC, United States
"The NEPAD e-Schools Demonstration Project: A Work in Progress"
highlights lessons learnt to date from the pan-African initiative.
infoDev and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) have released a public
report highlighting the lessons learnt from their monitoring and evaluation
(M&E) of the first "demonstration" phase of the ambitious NEPAD e-Schools
project, a multi-country, multi-stakeholder, continental initiative to impart ICT
skills to young Africans and to use ICT to improve the provision of education in
schools.
"The NEPAD e-Schools Demonstration Project: A Work in Progress" is meant
to share some of the general lessons learnt by various project
stakeholders to date with a larger community of interest. This public report draws on
information and analysis presented in a series of internal M&E reports to the NEPAD e-Africa Commission, which is coordinating the NEPAD e-Schools project. As such, it is not an end-of-project, summative impact evaluation.
The report examines the achievement of the specific objectives that were set for
the Demo, key assumptions that have impacted the implementation of the project,
constraints and challenges faced during implementation, project impact on
participating schools and project impact on ICT in education policy developments.
Report highlights
Referring to the many ICT in schools activities underway across the
continent, Shafika Isaacs, the founding executive director of SchoolNet Africa and
a member of the monitoring and evaluation team, states that:
?Amidst this myriad of interventions, programs, experiments and innovations
taking place in almost all African countries, sits the NEPAD e-Schools
Initiative....Never before has there really been a program that mobilised
national government participation and leadership at the official continental
level in the way the NEPAD e-Schools vision has. Further it has brought the
private sector into partnerships that, while experiencing growing pains, has
mobilised resources in a way that few other projects have been able to do.
And there is much yet to learn about doing this in an optimal way.?
Noting that the vision for the NEPAD e-Schools Demo may well have
exceeded the practical bounds of its reach within the expected timeframe of the
initial Demo project, and that the project is a very complex undertaking, given its
range of stakeholders and its international scope, the report finds that NEPAD
e-Schools remains a ?work in progress?. That said, the report states that "the
purpose of a demonstration project is not just to demonstrate, but also to learn
from the experience", noting that lessons about how to coordinate the successful
introduction of ICTs into African schools are being learned and applied
in a number of areas.
In perhaps its most noteworthy finding, the report states that participation in
the "Demo" phase of NEPAD e-Schools is reported to have had a catalytic effect
on education sector policy development, particularly in those countries where
the Demo has been fully implemented and where an ICT-in-education policy process had not been under way before the Demo was introduced.
The report concludes with a strong recommendation to include civil
society organisations to a much greater extent within the larger NEPAD e-Schools
framework and to ensure that planning is based on an awareness of global
best practice regarding the adoption and diffusion of ICT in education, the
development of sharable digital content, and teacher-training standards.
Background information about the NEPAD e-Schools Demo Project
The NEPAD e-Schools Initiative is a multi-country, multi-stakeholder,
continental initiative, which intends to impart ICT skills to young Africans in
primary and secondary schools and to use ICT to improve the provision of
education in schools. During the first stage of the NEPAD e-Schools
initiative, the "NEPAD e-Schools Demo" is being implemented in six schools in each
of 16 countries across Africa through partnerships that involve private sector
consortia, the country government and the NEPAD e-Africa Commission (eAC), which is responsible for developing the NEPAD ICT program and implementing its
projects.
The "NEPAD e-Schools Demo" is meant to inform the subsequent rollout of
the broader NEPAD e-Schools Initiative, and the monitoring and evaluation
activity supported by COL and infoDev was intended as key tool in this learning
process.
The observations presented in this report, "The NEPAD e-Schools Demonstration
Project: A Work in Progress", are intended to help shape the decision making
process of the broad range of stakeholders in the wider NEPAD e-Schools
initiative going forward.
Upcoming release of 'Survey of ICT and Education in Africa'
"The NEPAD e-Schools Demonstration Project: A Work in Progress" is the
first in a series of publications in late 2007 from infoDev and the Commonwealth
of Learning on issues related to ICT use in education in Africa. Results from a
related 53-country 'Survey of ICT and Education in Africa' are due to be
released in October 2007.
Related information
A full copy of the NEPAD e-Schools report can be obtained on the infoDev
web site at http://www.infodev.org/en/Publication.355.html.
For background on the monitoring and evaluation of the NEPAD e-Schools
project, please see http://www.infodev.org/nepad-eschools.
infoDev has published a general guide to issues related to the M&E of CT
use in education, "Monitoring and Evaluation of ICT in Education Projects:
A Handbook for Developing Countries", available at
http://www.infodev.org/en/Publication.9.html.
More information about the companion "Survey of ICT and Education in
Africa" can be found at http://www.infodev.org/ict4edu-Africa.
More information about the Commonwealth of Learning can be found on the
COL web site at http://www.www.col.org.
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