Education in Africa going digital

Elementary school children in Ethiopia with their inexpensive OPLC laptops. PHOTO/Petterik Wiggers/PANOS

Schools in Africa are going digital—with encouraging results.

Teaching at the Amaf school in Nairobi, Kenya used to be conducted with a blackboard and a handful of tattered textbooks. Now children in groups of five take turns to swipe the touch screen of the devices, which are loaded with a multimedia version of Kenya’s syllabus.

The tablets the school are an exception; they are part of a pilot project run by eLimu, a technology start-up. But if it and other firms are right, tablets and other digital devices may soon be the rule in African schools: many are betting on a boom in digital education in Kenya and elsewhere. Some executives even expect it to take off like M-Pesa, Kenya’s hugely successful mobile-money service.

A for-profit venture, eLimu (“education” in KiSwahili) is one of several local publishers which are looking to disrupt the business of traditional textbook vendors, which are often slow and expensive. It aims to show that digital content can be cheaper and better.

Such growth in digital education is timely. The number of children in Africa without school places may have dropped in recent years, but the flood of new pupils has overwhelmed state funded schools.

Read more at The Economist