e-News Oct. 2004

After one year of continuous training in Germany, the 17 participants of the recently finished it@ab 2004 programme return to their African home countries. With the projects they developed in Germany and spur on in their respective organizations and companies, they are expected to indicate new directions to a sustained development in their national IT industries. Though the prove of the success of any training programme is not in the programme itself, but in the application, prospects are promising: The presentations at the end of the programme showed amazing projects, some already operative.

It was about a year ago that the participants came to Germany. Their objective for the following twelve months: acquiring state-of-the-art skills and knowledge in the field of “Business Related IT Consultancy”. The it@ab programme, short for Information Technologies in African Business, that provided the framework for this ambitioned international project, had been designed by the German Capacity Building organization InWEnt on behalf of the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). 21 LearnLine AG, in charge with organizing and running the training in a blended learning environment with strong e-learning components and integrating class and face-to-face situations, put a strong accent on practice and OSS (Open Source Software) orientation.

The Goal: Sustained Development in the
African IT Business

The main concern during the programme was to maintain the strict orientation towards self sustained projects and overall development of the IT business in the participant’s home countries.
As for the technical skills, several training modules therefore focused on Open Source Software and programming tools like Python, PHP, Zope or Plone, which are believed to avoid costly commercial software without compromising the performance. Each participant brought their own concrete project with them, that they to a large extent completed during the it@ab programme. The last two weeks in Germany were dedicated to refining these projects and presenting them in Freiburg on August 30 and 31.

Some Sample Projects:

National Learning and Business Platform for South Africa

One representative example is the complete e-learning platform developed for his South African organization by Frans Nkoe. Fully equipped with demanding features like user tracking and integrated authoring tools, Nkoe sets high hopes in its ability to form a national e-learning community and a network of educational institutions. Besides, the platform will serve as a basis for commercial business projects. The final kick-off is scheduled for early 2005.

Commodity Information Module” for Malawi

A considerable lack of information and, hence, coordination is one of the main problems with the transportation of goods in Malawi, according to Frank Makoza. The result is agricultural commodities gone to waste, increased prices, and substantial losses for both the country and the respective producers.
The solution Makoza has to offer Malawi is known as “Transportation and Commodity Information Module”, an Internet based information exchange and business platform designed to find suitable means of transportation for goods and sign contracts directly online. Both buyer and seller of transportation capacity benefit from the system.

High Quality Education for Everyone – eTEM in Malawi

One of the most outstanding projects was presented by Priscilla Maliwichi and Patrick Chikumba, both members of the University of Malawi. e-TEM or e-Learning in Tertiary Education in Malawi aims at nothing less than “to provide high quality learning opportunities to all Malawian citizens at the lowest possible cost”, as the designers put it.
The two e-learning specialists have not only developed a highly functional education environment, but also provide several high quality web-based training modules on basic computer and IT knowledge. Fore more information see the eTEM Learning Portal that has been launched already.

Taking the Knowledge to Africa

The realization and implementation of the projects will be the next and crucial step for the it@ab graduates once they have returned to Africa. Over 80% of the Senior Managers of the African Partner-Organizations are estimating the relevance of the e-Projects for their own organizations as very high. The further development and success of these e-Projects will be a visible proof of the sustainability of the whole it@ab concept.