How the Global Education Coalition is contributing to transforming education in Africa

Global Teachers Campus

The Global Teachers Campus aims to help 1 million teachers gain digital skills and access professional development opportunities by 2025. It leverages UNESCO and partner relationships with training institutions as well as GEC-developed regional platforms, including Imaginecole and ImagineLearning, which were developed to offer countries across Francophone and Anglophone Africa access to the GTC's materials and the ability to tailor content to local context and educational needs.

The Imaginecole platform was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic with the main aim of ensuring educational continuity across 11 countries. Building on this success and with schools having opened their doors once again, the Imaginecole Resilient Initiative is now integrating digital educational resources into face-to-face teaching and learning scenarios and building the capacity of stakeholders with training workshops to promote the use of digital technology in education through the regional platform and national spaces. A new Image Bank collection has also been launched on the regional Imaginecole platform with UNESCO setting up an Africa contextualized image bank featuring a wide range of illustrations from all areas of education.

The GTC also continues to build on the progress previously achieved through the GEC-developed open-source Imagine Learning platform to develop a foundational base for collaborative design and co-ownership processes with Member States. The development of the platform aligns with the global demand to enhance teaching skills through digital methods. The complete source code for what was the Imaginelearning.africa platform, along with the custom content validation workflow, community engagement guidelines, and comprehensive GTC platform administration documentation, will be made available to Member States. These materials will provide guidance on contextual implementation steps, feasibility, and potential enhancements to ensure the platform's long-term sustainability to the ministries responsible for course creation and validation on their national platforms.

Global Skills Academy

The Global Skills Academy is scaling up to equip million learners with skills for decent jobs that can accelerate a transition to more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient economies by 2029. The Mission has initiatives in 18 countries in Africa. In Côte d'Ivoire, several GSA partners - IBM, Aleph, Pix and Microsoft - are supporting two new projects that aim to strengthen digital skills. Launched in November 2023 by UNESCO and Côte d'Ivoire's Ministry of Technical Education and Vocational Training (METFPA), the 12-month pilot will deliver training to support more than 300 young learners find employment as well as prepare more than 300 TVET administrative staff and teachers for the digitalization of the country's education system.

Working with three specialized TVET centers that focus on skills to access fashion and beauty employment, the first project aims to reinforce the digital marketing and entrepreneurship skills of young learners. IBM is supporting this effort by providing access to its IBM SkillsBuild Platform, which offers a 300-hour long entrepreneurship learning journey tailored to Côte d'Ivoire needs. Meanwhile, Aleph's Digital Ad Expert program allows users to learn about digital advertising tools, industry trends, and best practices on the world's leading digital platforms. Finally, Pix as a partner are aiding in the recruitment of learners through a digital competency test on their platform Pix.org.

The second project, with support from Microsoft, reinforces the digital skills of TVET teachers by aiding them to develop digital learning modules in their curricula. Targeting 20 TVET centers in the country's capital, the pilot involves more than 300 TVET teachers and administrative volunteers. Through the GSA, these participants will be able to access ready-to-teach curriculum and teaching materials on Microsoft's Learn Platform and Learn for Educators programs.

Global Learning House

Elsewhere in Cote d'Ivoire, a multi-partner collaboration is bringing online learning resources to three schools in remote communities. More than 5,500 students aged 11 to 24 as well as staff in the city of Yamoussoukro, the town of Boundiali, and the village of Kébi have already benefited from the installation of a new educational IT environment using satellite connection that allows their schools to access the latest national content and applications.

Launched in November 2022 by the Ministry of National Education and Literacy (MENA), this pilot enables digital education through a comprehensive solution that allows for both online and offline learning. The installation of Spacecom's Digital Community Platform (DCP) offers a cost effective and scalable solution that provides access to the Ministry's national education content through Mon École à la Maison, along with additional content and applications provided by UNESCO through its partnership with Tactileo, Imaginecole that reside on a local cloud in each school. As some target communities are off the power grid, the solution includes a solar power system that enables the school's DCP ICT infrastructure to function. GLH partner Spacecom, UNESCO, and the Ministry of National Education and Literacy (MENA) have co-organized teacher and school leader training sessions to support the meaningful integration of these resources into pedagogical instruction.

Gender

In some sub-Saharan African countries as little as 10% of students in physics, mathematics, and engineering programs are women. In Kenya, Rwanda, the United Republic of Tanzania, and Uganda, Intel and UNESCO continue to deliver a suite of interventions aimed at inspiring secondary school girls to embrace science through support to teachers' professional development, mentoring, role modelling, parental and peer support, and awareness raising and sharing of good practices.

In 2023, participatory training for over 180 education actors, including teachers and educators, school administrators, teacher trainers, and ministry staff, contributed to their enhanced understanding of factors influencing girls' participation, learning achievement and retention in STEM studies, and strengthened capacities to create gender-responsive STEM educational environments that engage, empower, and inspire girls. A support network was also created to share good practices and knowledge to identify efforts to engage girls in these areas, complemented by STEM bootcamps and mentoring for over 400 girls.

Meanwhile, in Senegal, the second, 12 -month phase of their successful Keeping Girls in the Picture campaign aims to promote girls' continuity of learning and contribute to eradicating early marriage and early and unintended pregnancy. The campaign, launched by UNESCO and Wallonie-Bruxelles International, will reach an additional 1.5 million people in rural areas where there are high drop-out rates among girls, through local-level, contextualized, and collaborative action aimed at building awareness through school management committees, community radio, youth activists, and parent-teacher associations.

Digital Transformation Collaborative

Across Africa, only 40% of primary schools and 50% of lower-secondary schools are connected to the internet. Full digital transformation of education with internet connectivity in schools and homes would cost over a billion per day just to operate and most countries cannot cover the cost burden drawing entirely from domestic budgets alone. Additionally, 1 in 3 national digital learning platforms developed during the COVID-19 pandemic are no longer functional.

The Digital Transformation Collaborative aims to move the sector beyond the culture of small-scale pilot projects and towards a culture of large-scale change and transformation. Towards the end of 2023, the DTC carried out its first in-country analysis workshop with representatives of the DTC partner government of Egypt. A group of 20 DTC partners including both global and local representatives convened in Cairo alongside more than 200 local participants including government representatives and local partners mobilized by the Ministry of Education and Technical Education (MoETE) of Egypt. The workshop discussed the country's education priorities as well as Egypt's journey of digital transformation across the DTC's framework using the Maturity Model self-assessment. The results of the analysis workshop are now supporting further analysis efforts from the Egypt Country Team and DTC Country Collaborative and will lay the foundation of the planning phase, which will in turn establish the work plans for Egypt-DTC initiatives. Separate engagement efforts with government representatives from South Africa also contributed to the formation of the DTC's vision.

Throughout 2024 - the African Union Year of Education - the Global Education Coalition, through its Missions and the DTC, will continue to foster bold partnerships, support decision-makers, and scale up successful initiatives to harness the power of digital learning to close educational and digital divides across Africa.