Cisco Joins in a Quest to Give All African Schools Access to ICT within 10 Years
March 26, 2007
By Jason Deign, News@Cisco
Cisco® is one of several leading technology companies engaged in an educational experiment that could change the fortunes of an entire continent.
The company is heading one of five private sector consortia involved in a major project to see how information and communications technologies (ICTs) might be able to help improve primary and secondary education in Africa.
Called e-Schools, the project ultimately aims to give all 600,000-plus schools in Africa access to ICT-based education within 10 years. It involves other major companies including HP, Microsoft, Oracle and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
E-Schools is being overseen by the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), an economic development program run by the African Union, a federation of 53 states which covers the whole continent except for Morocco.
Currently e-Schools is in a demo phase intended to try out different approaches to ICT in education, with a view to selecting those that are most effective and rolling them out more widely. This phase of the project encompasses six schools in each of 16 countries.
Cisco is working to create educational pilots in 16 schools across six of these countries: Algeria, Senegal, Ghana, Mauritius, South Africa and Rwanda (where implementation has been completed and a pilot launched on October 5, 2006).
In each of these countries, demo e-Schools are being created with Cisco providing power generation and stabilization, Internet connectivity (often via satellite) and a full wireless PC lab environment with 20 student devices and five teacher laptops.
Each school is also equipped with projection capability, including Smart boards, a media center that can be used for community purposes, a printer, fax, copier and scanner, tailored educational and healthcare content, and a school administration capability.
Cisco is furthermore supporting the project with teacher, administrator and ICT training plus ongoing technical support and maintenance for a year, after which it is hoped that enough will have been learned to enable the schools to be self-supporting.
This may seem like a lot of investment for little apparent return. But for South Africa-based Bill Souders, program director for the NEPAD e-Schools Initiative at Cisco, there is no question about being part of the project. "It would be kind of hard to explain why we weren't involved," he says.
Learning is a core concern for Cisco, with Chief Executive John Chambers often quoted as saying that "the two great equalizers in life are the Internet and education" and the company recently donating U.S. $80 million for schools affected by Hurricane Katrina in the United States.
Furthermore, says Souders: "We are already a participating member of ISPAD, the Information Society Partnership for Africa's Development, to which we donate US$100,000 a year, and this seemed a natural extension to Cisco's corporate social responsibility activities."
In addition, the company is already engaged in another significant educational initiative across the continent, in the form of the Cisco Networking Academy® Program, which includes more than 500 regional and local academies in the Africa and Middle East region.
But perhaps most importantly, the e-Schools project could help give Cisco and others vital experience in the ICT-based delivery of educational content - and not just in Africa.
"When you talk to heads of state or ministers of education they say that while affordability is going to be an issue, they want to leapfrog into the future," says Souders.
This means that Africa could at some point be teaching the rest of the world how to teach. The lessons learned by e-School sponsors such as Cisco could be invaluable in helping develop new educational processes and products elsewhere across the globe.
Right now, content for the project is being distributed to the schools over the Internet, usually via a VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) satellite connection, from a central management hub featuring a Cisco CDM-4630 content distribution manager and a Cisco 510 root content engine.
Schools capture the content via a VSAT receiver dish connected to a Cisco 2800 Series integrated services router, which in turn is linked to a Cisco Catalyst® 2900 Series switch feeding another 510 content engine, a Cisco Aironet wireless access point and possibly a phone.
On the back of this basic model, Cisco is testing a number of different classroom and ICT configurations.
Says Souders: "In some schools we are using fixed desktops but in Ghana we have a movable cabinet with 20 PCs, a server and a wireless access point so we can move between buildings and divide up the computers according to class requirements."
Cisco is also trialing technologies such as Windows CE-based Personal Internet Communicators, developed by AMD, and smart-boards which can be used in conjunction with PCs to project material to a whole class.
"It is still too early to deduce much from these lab setups," points out Souders. "But what is clear is that everyone is keen for them to work. There is a real appetite to collaborate."
Jason Deign is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.
