The NileView
Can digital transformation help Africa universally invest in its human capital for more inclusive and impactful development?
Information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) has been evolving for almost four decades, realizing socioeconomic development and growth and capitalizing on channels for information acquisition and knowledge dissemination. This allowed the creation of an emerging global knowledge-based society with innovative means of communication that can help increase competitiveness for individuals, organizations, and societies.
Furthermore, the acceleration of digital transformation can be used as an effective platform to minimize the digital divide and promote social inclusion. The ICT-enabled transformation process that occurred due to the Covid-19 pandemic is affecting different aspects of our lives and had a profound influence on many people earning their livelihood from a business. The pandemic is also forcing governments to rethink the way forward as they strategize for their developmental objectives.
For Africa, digital transformation could be invaluable to minimize its intra- and inter-digital divide, capitalizing on emerging technologies but, more importantly, focusing on human capital as the most valuable asset in society.
The sudden spread of the pandemic has caught the entire world by surprise. Its spread included the developed and developing worlds with no discrimination, reaching all the corners of the planet, including Africa. In a very short space of time, the virus affected all dimensions of society, including higher education. The impact of Covid-19 coupled with national lockdowns and health and safety measures taken by different countries magnified and revealed the deficiencies in higher education. It demonstrated that the sector is not resilient to crises of such magnitude. Surely, there were variations across different countries. However, across the African continent, equity in higher education remains a significant challenge to societal development, economic growth, and prosperity, and the pandemic exacerbated the problem.
According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), twenty-one days after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced Covid-19 a global pandemic, on 1 April 2020, schools and higher education institutions were closed in 185 countries. This action affected more than 1.5 billion learners, constituting 89.4 percent of total enrolled learners around the world. There was an impact on all aspects of higher education including the academic triangle of teaching, research, and service through community engagement.
It is worth noting that the conventional delivery mode in higher education has been basically stable for the last few centuries: face-to-face exchange of information from teacher to learner. Over the years, the topics and disciplines have changed, but not the pedagogy and the delivery approaches. However, with the gradual emergence of the knowledge-based society and the increasing and influential power and reach of information and communication technologies, how content is delivered makes a world of difference to how much learners retain and create sustained knowledge, capacities, and skills.
As a result of the pandemic, higher education institutions and universities in Africa faced various serious challenges while pivoting to remote learning, research, and administration using different online platforms and infrastructures. The challenges included limited digital infrastructure, bandwidth, and human resource capacities, to mention a few, which made the transition more difficult. Despite the universities’ efforts to ensure equitable access to learning, less fortunate students and learners were disadvantaged by the move to online learning following the health and safety measures, including lockdowns and curfews.
These inter-and intra- digital differences and divides highlighted the urgent need to significantly investing in technology infrastructure and promoting digital literacy across the society, including higher education administrators, faculty, and students. Although universities and higher education institutions have invested resources, time, and efforts in finding new innovative delivery approaches for learning, almost 18 months after Covid-19 hit the world, higher education is still struggling to provide alternative teaching methods whilst facing significant challenges with student mobility, admissions, funding, research, and the quality of delivering the same student-centered learning experience.
Therefore, there is an urgent need for African governments to invest in upgrading their digital infrastructure. This is crucial to ensure that higher education institutions have the proper high-speed broadband internet connectivity to benefit from the acceleration in digital transformation and the global transition to online learning and research platforms and allowing them to engage, benefit as well as enrich a much-anticipated interconnected global higher education ecosystem.
African universities will hopefully emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic changed, and they are likely to pursue different strategies in managing the future of learning. We firmly believe that Africa is the continent of the 21st century. Its relatively youthful 1.2 billion people represent one of its most important assets. Investing in this incredible human capital repository can be a game-changer for future growth and prosperity.
However, for higher education institutions across the African continent to become key players in development, they need to be equipped with the human capital, infrastructure, and resources required to provide different scholars, researchers, and learners the opportunity to collaborate locally, regionally, and internationally through the internet.
Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the role of higher education and the future of learning cannot be emphasized. Institutionalizing a culture of digital transformation is no longer an option. It would require the formulation of a nationwide vision for digitization for each of Africa’s 54 countries that allows flexibility, dynamism, resilience, and continuous improvement. This should be coupled with sustainable investment in a state-of-the-art information and communication technology infrastructure coupled with investment in online competencies. These include, inter alia, online instructional design and pedagogy, content development, and capacity building, fostering skills required for the future of work in the 21st century. Universities should become more interdisciplinary with innovative, entrepreneurial, experiential, personalized, and competency-based learning processes. Technology allows for more interactive and participatory student-centered learning experiences by redesigning the delivery approach into being more holistic by integrating on and off-campus curricular activities and engaging different constituents in the learning ecosystem. In short, moving forward, universities should become learning hubs and interconnected powerhouses of intellectual contribution through value-added research that address sustainable development goals while addressing the issues of the digital divide and offer a more inclusive learning experience to all students and learners.
Higher education institutions and universities have never been more invaluable as a critical partner so that students and learners across Africa have equal universal access to learning, whether face-to-face, online, or hybrid, for a more just, inclusive, and sustainable development journey. However, this is a societal effort that surely African universities cannot undertake by themselves. It requires the collective efforts, support, and engagement of all constituents in society, including governments, the private sector, civil society, and international organizations. Furthermore, there is a need for more effective multilateralism in the global higher education ecosystem and constructive dialogue around global issues and identifying adaptive solutions to local conditions coupled with win-win internationalization schemes that can endorse and support universities to collaborate and learn from each other.
The Covid-19 pandemic has also highlighted inefficiencies in higher education and should prompt the sector to be more dynamic, flexible, and innovative. The future of management education in Africa should focus on new business models. These models are driven by collaboration with different constituents for inclusivity and maximizing societal impact but also across national borders for diversity through innovative digital partnerships. They include the adoption of all-inclusive hybrid and flexible pedagogical practices and the reimagining of higher education institutions as global learning networks for the creation, communication, and exchange of knowledge, skills, capacities, and ideas.
Africa must reimagine its higher education ecosystem to become a critical constituent integral to the developmental process. There will not be one size fits all approach, but each higher education institution and university should decide how to rethink the future of learning and move forward while factoring in the new realities of the world in which we live today.
Change is never easy. But 2020 has shown the world that, after all, people do change and change fast if needs be. The question is how societies, especially in Africa –a continent with great potentials yet ample challenges– can benefit from such change and help realize a scalable and sustainable impact.
Technology is only a platform and enabler. It still requires humans to conceptualize and implement solutions to societal problems, aided by digital means. Whilst technology investment is crucial, the investment in education –accelerating human capabilities– as represented by higher education, will determine the future of Africa.
About the authors: Piet Naudé is a Professor of Ethics at the University of Stellenbosch Business School in South Africa, and Sherif Kamel is a Professor of Management, Dean of the School of Business at The American University in Cairo, and President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt
28 April 2021
Issue #13
very insightful, and I see that in the coming few months there should be collaborations and cooperations between both the universities and the Industry leaders that are running their businesses and their firms. all of this under the concept of Entrepreneurship and Innovation domains.