At least 120 teachers from the frontier counties are benefitting from a digital literacy-training program, which they will in turn impart on the more than 34,844 learners in different schools in the counties.
The program, which is sponsored by the Education Technology Easy Africa Organization (EdTech) and other partners in the education sector, is aimed at helping the teachers and learners in marginalized areas, to access the digital services and adopt technology in their classrooms.
According to Peter Wairagu, the Country Manager for Raspberry Pi Foundation, which is one of the partners in the program, the trained teachers will become digital champions in their schools and train teaching colleague on the knowledge acquired.
“We have seen the ripple effect that when you train one teacher, they also go to their schools and teach their colleagues because the current world is ICT integration for every subject and we believe that before long, we shall be able to cover all the schools, reaching all the learners in the frontier counties,” Wairagu said.
By introducing technology in schools, the stakeholders aim to inspire the young learners at a young stage to venture into the ICT sector and become innovators.
Speaking during a press briefing in Garissa, EdTech CEO, Jennifer Otieno, said that they are creating a platform where different stakeholders can come together and create solutions for challenges facing adoption of technology in schools.
“We are a community of EdTech enablers and innovators coming together to see how technology can solve the challenges in the frontier counties to improve the effectiveness, the inclusivity and resilience of education,” Jennifer said.
“Our community includes policy makers, teachers, researchers, digital infrastructure providers, entrepreneurs and community based leaders. The challenges in education are complex and no single actor can solve these challenges alone,” she added.
Otieno further noted that since last year when the program was launched for frontier counties, there have been a lot of improvement in integrating ICT into the teaching process.
“We have heard so many stories from the ground about the credible innovations, improvement in teaching and learning, and about emerging technologies being adopted in homes, classrooms and communities and we want to see how these experiences can inform the policy process so that we design strategies from a national perspective,” she said.
Abdullahi Maalim, the Regional Lead for Education and Governance in the Frontier Counties Development Council (FCDC), regretted that the counties have experienced a lot of historical marginalization, thus leading to poor access to education and digital literacy.
At the same time, Maalim called on the Ministry of Education to provide more learning tablets to schools in the region, since most of those previously distributed have broken down.
Maalim lamented regret that some areas in the region have no network service or electricity, which are crucial in sustaining ICT learning and called on the development partners to work together and ensure that these challenges are resolved.
“The FCDC counties have undergone a lot of historical marginalization that have been caused by the whims of climate change, underdevelopment and as a result we have been performing badly in the developmental matrix, including education and digital literacy,” Maalim said.
“However, all is not lost. There are deliberate efforts by the National Government, the counties and the development partners to make sure that there is some level of equalization and equity provisions and thus the region is opening up for a lot of opportunities,” he added.
Other stakeholders in the program include the Ministry of Education, Unicef Kenya, AI for Education and the MasterCard Foundation.
By Erick Kyalo
