Senegal Will Host the Next eLearning Africa Conference

The Case de la Tout Petits in Dakar welcomes children at pre-kindergarten age. The project seeks to ensure that Senegalese children under the of six, and particularly those who are underprivileged, have access to adequate and integrated services catering for livelihood, development, protection and harmonious social integration. At the Case, the children are also introduced to computers as a tool for playful learning, making them familiar with the digital technologies. This initiative is just one example of Senegal’s activities to integrate Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) into the country’s education system. For the eLearning Africa newsletter, Christine Cayre briefly introduces the country.

Dakar will be the hosting city for the fourth edition of eLearning Africa, taking place from May 27th – 29, 2009. Here we briefly introduce the country and its activities in the implementation of technology-enhanced learning (eLearning).

Country Brief
Senegal is situated in West Africa. Stretching over an area of 196 722 km², it has 10,500,000 inhabitants. The density of the populations is 48 inhabitants per km². More than 25 percent of the populations live in the region around the capital Dakar. Bordering Mauritania in the North, Mali in the East and Guinea and Guinea Bissau in the South, a 500 km long Atlantic coast flanks the country to the West. Part of the coastal beach belongs to the Gambia, a small enclave within Senegal. The capital, Daka, is a peninsula at the very east of the country. Senegal is known as Pays de la Teranga; in the West African language Wolof, teranga means “welcome”, incarnating the Senegalese hospitality and tradition of welcoming.

Development of ICTs and Current Projects in Education*

The government of Senegal has formally agreed on a National ICT policy, acknowledging the potential the technology holds for the country’s economic development and modernisation. Even if the formal policy has not yet been integrated in the education sector in any formal policy, many projects to modernise the school system have been initiated by the Ministry of Education and its partners. La Case de la Tout Petits is one example of the integration of information technologies in a project to develop children under six.

Despite this positive example, obstacles to the integration of ICTs in the education system remain, such as the low level of technical infrastructure and lack of equipment in many schools, as well as inequalities in access to the Internet. At the primary and secondary school level, the computer-to-student ratio varies between one per twenty to one per two thousand. The availability of connection to the Internet is also quite divergent: one hundred percent of the universities are connected, but the percentage in the high schools and schools is much lower.

The Ministry of Education has created a National Commission for the Integration of Information and Communication Technologies (COMNITICE) in the school curriculum. This commission is responsible, in conjunction with the Ministry’s Computer Technology Unit, for promoting the use of technology as a tool for teaching and learning in schools.

Significant progress has been made, but the integration of ICT into the Senegalese school curricula and the country on the whole is still in the promotion phase. The government actively seeks to establish public-private partnerships to improve infrastructure and increase the number of computers in educational institutions. Targeted initiatives are underway; however, access to technology-enhanced learning for all students is still far from reality.

The development of teaching content, the follow-up by educational administrators as well as the intensification in the use of ICT at different teaching levels indicate that Senegal is ahead in the integration and use of ICT in schools. However, ICT is not yet widely used as a source of gaining new knowledge. Limiting factors include the poor supply of equipment in schools, the undependable electricity supply, and the hitherto non-existent telephone coverage in large parts of the countryside. The current boom in mobile telephony and the multiplication of operators in the telecommunication sector, though, are factors that can help Senegal put its ICT policy in place in the near future.

Current ICT Initiatives and Projects (selection)

African Virtual University

The African Virtual University is an intergovernmental organisation disseminating training courses in collaboration with other African higher education institutions. It provides distance-learning courses to support local institutions, thus improving course offerings in response to an ever-increasing demand.

Sinkou

The Sinkou cyber campus, costing a total of FCFA1.2 million, consists of an impressive computer lab equipped with 500 state-of-the-art computers. A high-speed Internet connection through a VSAT antenna opens students up to a world that allows them to enhance their studies and further their research. In its second phase, the project includes Gaston Berger University in Saint-Louis, the community colleges in Thiès, Ziguinchor, and Bambey, as well as different professional training institutes, high schools, and middle schools. The project funding is FCFA 5 billion.

SchoolNet Africa

In June 2006, SchoolNet Africa, a pan-African organisation specialising in promoting ICT and education, moved its headquarters to the School of Education (Faculté des Sciences et Technologies de l’Education et de la formation) of the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar. As a partner of SchoolNet Africa, GEEP and the School of Education hosted a training workshop to establish technical service centres in francophone African countries to support the sourcing, refurbishment, distribution, and maintenance of second-hand PCs to schools.

Civil Society Projects

Senegal has had learners and teachers participate in civil-society-type projects such as the Global Teenager Project and the Mtandao Afrika programme. Mtandao Afrika (MAf) Internet Challenge is a website contest for African youth aged nine to twelve. The contest focuses on the creation of African websites with African content and promotes the use of African local languages.
For more information: www.mtandao-afrika.org

Global Teenager Project

The Global Teenager Project (GTP) aims to enlighten teenage learners about ICTs and to develop their conceptual understanding of the way the technologies can be used to pursue their learning goals – particularly by using the technology to enable worldwide interaction with peers. For example, it enables participants to become part of learning circles in different languages, runs world conferences on global citizenship, and supplies corporate literature.
For more information: www.globalteenager.org

Dakar’s Digital Francophone Campus

This partnership between the State, Sonatel and Salta Service International establishes a network of inter-university and inter-school telecommunication hosted by the UCAD library, RESAFAD-ICTE and the University Information Network Project.

FASTEF

FASTEF (Faculté des Sciences et Technologies de l’Education et de la Formation School of Education) leads a couple of initiatives. One, the Computer-Education Laboratory, offers basic training in computers to the students and teachers involved in the UNESCO programme in educational sciences (CUSE) delivered by distance learning. The other, the Center for the Application, Study, and Resources in Distance Learning (CAERENAD) is a programme financed by the ACDI.

GEEP

GEEP (Group for Population Studies and Education) is a project testing the installation of “youth cyber spaces” in middle and high schools. It is run in collaboration with IDRC in Canada in the context of the Acacia Senegal Plan. It was launched in 2000.

UNESCO CMC Scale-Up Project

Twenty-four community multimedia centres (CMCs) have been set up, and hundreds of thousands of people living in remote rural areas can now access community radio, computers with Internet connection, and Digital devices. The CMCs constitute the most important network of community access to ICT.

La Case des Tout Petits www.case-toupetit.sn

* Facts and Figures are taken from Babacar Fall 2007: Survey of ICT in Education in Senegal. In: Survey of ICT and Education in Africa (Volume 2): 53 Country Reports info. Washington, DC . infoDev / World Bank.

September 23, 2008

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