Civil Society Outlook: Where Can ICT Contribute Most?
Interview: Shafika Isaacs, Executive Director, SchoolNet - South Africa

The Development Gateway interviewed Shafika Isaacs, the Executive Director of SchoolNet Africa as part of its Special Report, ”Information Society: The Next Steps". The report coincides with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), Phase 2, being held in Tunisia from November 16-18, 2005.

Q:In your opinion, what are the areas in which information and communication technologies (ICT) can contribute most? How would you rate the success of ICT as an enabler to achieving the Millennium Development Goals?

Isaacs: ICT are purported to have multiple functionalities that enable it to serve under-privileged communities very effectively, provided they have access. Since ICT has the capacity to make large volumes of educational resources available, facilitate the delivery of educational resources on a large scale, reach the remotest areas possible and facilitate effective self-directed learning at an individual level, all suggest that this capacity for supporting educational provision in the context of severe deprivation, has to be tried. However, access to resources alone do not make them effective tools for learning. An enabling environment to support the delivery of learning and teaching is absolutely critical alongside dedicated programs for skills development in the use of ICT as a learning enabler and high volume access to the technologies as well. Furthermore, dedicated attention to the creation of localized education content that accommodates learning in mother tongue is also important for such an integrated approach to ICT access and application for learning. For this reason, SchoolNet Africa has worked over time to develop a value chain model that takes into account of a host of factors and prerequisites to make the education system work effectively and systemically using ICT.

It would be unfair to judge the overall success of ICT as such an enabler at this point in time because it has not been tried to sufficient scale nor with sufficient commitment to reach the MDGs and the Education For All objectives particularly in Africa. However, where ICT has been tried, albeit on a small scale, there have been relative successes, particularly in the SchoolNet movement in Africa. I discuss this in my article in "Emerging Trends on School Networking" published by Commonwealth of Learning in 2005.

Q: Give us some examples of challenges you encounter in using ICT for development and innovative ways in which you have managed to overcome them?

Isaacs: The biggest challenge we have faced is dealing with extension and sustainability of good projects using ICT for education once the pilot phase has been concluded and integration of the projects into a national strategy with dedicated government budget support. A few SchoolNets, which are part of the SchoolNet Africa network, have devised various ways to deal with matters of sustainability such as the provision of low cost Internet access to schools as a service provider, or allowing non-school based communities to use the school-based cyber labs for a fee. Such examples are cited extensively in an African SchoolNet Toolkit recently published by SchoolNet Africa.

The other major challenge is to sustain the involvement of African teachers once they have gone through a phase of training on the use of ICT and then go back to their schools where access to ICT is either non-existent or available to a very limited extent. The issue of high volume access to ICT, in the school context in particular, has proven to be the one major challenge that we have to face in Africa. For this reason, SNA launched a Campaign for One Million PCs to highlight this need for large-scale access and to encourage national governments to take the lead in committing national budgets and partnering with the private sector and civil society in making IT happen in education. The Kenyan government has just announced a commitment of $1.2 million USD towards its budget for ICT in education in Kenya. Similarly, in the Gauteng Province of South Africa, the government committed R500 million towards roll out of ICT to all schools in the province. This, coupled with a systematic program to train and retain teachers using ICT, would mark a major step forward for African education.

Q: How can governments support civil society efforts to harness ICT for development?

Isaacs: With particular reference to ICT-enabled education, one major way in which African governments in particular can support education and civil society is to draw on the foundations established and pioneered by many civil society organizations over the past decade involving ICT in education. So many practitioners from SchoolNet type NGOs throughout Africa have learned many, many lessons and continue to play a leading role in the successful application of ICT in educational institutions and often government-led initiatives function in parallel to these initiatives. Drawing on the expertise of civil society, supporting programs of civil society and bringing civil society institutions on board with government plans and actions is crucial for the success of educational reach through ICT.