Dr. Lawalley Aba Cole, Executive Director of CAFOR, began his speech by highlighting that African education needs to be digitized and that technology innovation can play a crucial role in this process. According to Dr. Cole, Africans must work toward solving their problems within the African Union Programs. Dr. Cole stressed the importance of collaborating with governments and individuals to increase sustainability and performance and emphasized the need to work together as a community towards the ambitious goal of transforming education in Africa with digitalization.
During the conference, Mr. Kevin Jackson, Consultant at CAFOR, presented the Digital Teacher Training project. He stated that the shortage of teachers in Africa is becoming more pronounced and that technology can be used to recruit, train and retain teachers on an unprecedented scale. He suggested that chatbot technology can offer speed, scale, and cost-effectiveness to support existing solutions.
Ms. Dominika Gyányi, Consultant at CAFOR, presented data showing that 40-50% of learning problems in Africa can be traced back to native language development, reading, text comprehension, speaking, or lack of vocabulary development. Ms. Gyányi introduced the new African Digital Library (ADL), which includes interactive technology-enhanced digital books with assistive features to address this issue. She stated that the new ADL will be more accessible and reachable and will engage youths in Africa in reading with interesting digital content resulting in greater attention, focus, and comprehension, which will lead to better academic outcomes and increased literacy rates on the continent.
Mr. Brian Baptista, Lead Consultant at CAFOR, presented the African Learning Planet, a central digital hub for learning in Africa. It acts as the one-stop hub for learning materials, including the African Digital Library, TVET Digital Library, and the Digital Teacher Training Initiative, with multiple local and international learning materials supplied through partners.
During the Q&A session, a participant asked Ms. Gyányi how the digital library plans to provide its content and services in the face of the over 200 main languages spoken in Africa. Ms. Gyányi responded that the first phase of the project implementation, which focuses on creating access, would use the most common instructional language, English. However, the project will aim to provide its content in a broader range of languages over time, including French and Portuguese, and since the advanced technology used on the platform allows it, a wide range of native African languages would be provided by its content partners.