The CAFOR Roundtable Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia – 15 February 2023

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.

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.