Dissecting the African Digital Divide: Diffusing e-Learning in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Many countries identified with the developing world, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, have been recipients of aid programs over the past five decades totaling billions of dollars and aimed at fostering social and economic development to achieve global parity with the industrialized world. Much of this activity has been focused on building capacity in the higher education sector, especially through the introduction and implementation of distance education delivery systems to move from print to electronic resources for teaching and learning. The conventional wisdom is that, despite these efforts, success will ultimately be compromised by the lack of available and affordable technology. In fact, the constraints imposed by culturally driven traditional educational practices, as well as lack of strategic planning and effective management, are at least as powerful barriers to change in this arena. Unless both indigenous and expatriate advocates, consultants and managers of online learning are able to integrate new systems and structures, whether modest or ambitious, with new instructional approaches, the consequence of much of their efforts is likely to be an overlay of impressive instructional technology that largely masks the continuation of colonial-era, print-dependent educational practices.