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Secondary and Post-Secondary Initiatives

Published on 2010/8/19 in Education and General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .
Image representing Accenture as depicted in Cr...
Accenture advised on SEDP2 / tbt

Continuing from last week’s post on Primary initiatives in Tanzania with US corporations:

Secondary: Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow (SEDP2) (pdf SEDP II overview) (home page)

This project, utilizing the business consulting expertise of Accenture, is still very much in the planning stages to discover the tools necessary to bring the next big jumpstart of quality for Tanzania’s high school/secondary education system. It may be funded by 450Mil grant similar to the SEDP from years past that drastically increased the number of secondary schools and secondary school enrollment.

Founding Ideas:

  • Will work with 4,000 schools, and 1.5m secondary school students each year.
  • Secondary Teachers can be more effective with laptop + inexpensive projector.
  • Computers can be a platform for continuing education.
  • Video and Distance eLearning might be used as a way to provide valuable, well-educated teachers with opportunities to live in desirable and well supported locales such as Dar Es Salaam but still reach the millions of rural students in remote areas with weaker infrastructure.
  • Video may also allow fewer teachers to reach more students in fast-expanding areas like Dar Es Salaam.

Links:

Post-Secondary: UDOM/University of Dodoma partners with IBM (link)

There are also the beginnings of parallel efforts to improve collaboration of new Tanzanian Universities with outside organizations. IBM has followed up on its initiative to send many of its Corporate Service Corps members to University of Dodoma over the last year with an agreement with Tri-Continental to help service the swiftly growing Dodoma University as it reaches for its 40,000 student goal, along with improvements which may be related to governance and the primary and secondary levels.

Speaking recently when presenting a paper at a training session in Dar es Salaam, IBM East Africa marketing and communications manager Maureen Muthua said the agreement between IBM and the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training aimed at helping realise the government’s vision of building a ‘Silicon Valley’ type of environment around Dodoma University. (link)

This post continued from 3 Major Corporate ICT Collaborations at Each Education Level: Tanzania. Don’t miss the first page.

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3 Major Corporate ICT Collaborations at Each Education Level: Tanzania

Published on 2010/8/16 in Education and General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Prominent US Corporations such as Accenture, Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco have recently engaged themselves with US development initiatives to improve education in East Africa’s largest country of Tanzania. Their ICT-oriented goals are set very high for a country where 95% of finishing students have never seen a desktop computer but they follow on of the legacy of substantial successes of the PEDP and SEDP programs of the past decade.

Back before those actions, most people’s children had never been in a secondary school classroom, too few even saw inside of a primary school. As shown in the graph last week, now primary and secondary school classrooms are equitably within reach of most, but quality lessons are still longed for by students. This challenge of quality improvement sits behind all the government’s collaborations of the coming years:

Primary: 21st Century Basic Education Program (link, USAID)

A 49Mil USAID grant to be awarded (likely) to one of the major three development organizations. It is to try to revolutionize elementary/primary school education in the small mainland region of Mtwara and the islands of Unguja and Pemba on Zanzibar. The goal seems to be to create radically computerized prototypical model regions where prevalent inexpensive computers available to most primary school teachers and some students to change the way primary school–especially the lower standards (1-4) are taught. Mtwara is a southern coastal region of Tanzania that has historically had trouble developing. It is fairly small (1mil people of 42mil in TZ) but still has Teachers Colleges, making it a good region for experimentation. Unguja, the main island of Zanzibar, also, despite its glossy tourism-oriented reputation, has been challenged in improving English literacy and improving general education of its students. Pemba lacks even the veneer of tourism. All of these small but very underserved areas will have extremely varying degrees of electricity and connectivity.

The USAID office in Dar Es Salaam, along with the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT) may have come up with this plan as a prototype extension to PEDP from years past.

Highlights:

  • Focus on implementing a cohesive Education Management Information System (EMIS) (pg 35). Possibly by working with Microsoft.
  • The EMIS would help manage national school test score results, a system currently accessed by most of the TZ population and fairly challenging to use..
  • Laptops for teachers, 1:1 computer share model for students with 2hrs/wk of usage on Office software.
  • Skoool software by Intel as used by other countries such as Egypt.
  • Improving Teacher Housing and facilities using modern materials–”procurement of pre-fabricated teacher housing and classrooms made from composite panel material composed of a high quality foam core covered with Glass fiber Reinforced Resin skin (GRR) or Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) composite panel.”
Following Next: Major Secondary and Post-Secondary Initiatives in Tanzania.

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