Opinion: Caution must be taken in School's latptops project.

When Erin Hayba began a project to bring computers to solar-powered schools in the world's biggest refugee camp, there were plenty of sceptics. "People said, 'No, this can't happen, you're in a refugee camp, why don't not stick with paper and pencil and chalkboards?'" she recalls.

Two years later, there are 215 computers spread among 32 primary, seven secondary and four vocational schools in the Dadaab complex in north-east Kenya, home to more than 400,000 people, mostly from nearby Somalia. Each school has a solar panel.

"Many of the youth told me they want to learn computers so they can get a job when they go back to Somalia," she told the eLearning Africa international conference in Windhoek, Namibia. "Teachers are saying some students are coming back to school who might have dropped out."

But the intentions of the world's leading tech companies came under scrutiny during a recent
conference on ICT for development, education and training, attended by 1,500 participants. Efforts to close the gap between California's Silicon Valley and the specific needs of millions of African children were not always successful.

Having extended fibre optic cables to every village, Namibia is seen as ahead of the game. But, experts argue that the country suffers from a lack of funds, equipment and content development. "The other inhibiting factor is lack of skills. There are schools that have computers but they don't have anyone to teach computers. We need to embark on massive training."

A British tech investor who worked in e-learning for 30 years, warns: "Be very careful of people who want to sell you tablets. There have been some disaster stories in the UK with tablets going out of the classroom."
Research shows that typing on a tablet is 20-30% less efficient than on a keyboard, he argued, and "kids end up writing in shorter sentences". In a separate seminar he described tablets as "teacher unfriendly", offering no feel for keys, slow text editing, and difficulties in networking.
"We must be careful in terms of thinking all of this is good," Clark said. "There is research that the tablet manufacturers don't want you to read that suggests they inhibit literacy. The keyboard is very important in terms of developing literacy."

He criticizes education tech gurus and urged: "Don't let educational colonialism sneak in through the backdoor with bucket loads of hardware and content that is inappropriate for your children."
 A recurring theme was past mistakes in which corporations have thrown technology at grateful African countries like a blunt instrument, offering little training, backup, or reference to a wider ecosystem. The continent has become a graveyard of abandoned laptops and good intentions.

Another tech giant, Samsung, displayed one of its mobile classrooms, donating it to the host nation. Its corporate citizenship manager, Kea' Modimoeng, admitted: " "There's been a lot of technology dumped in Africa and it's not always useful technology.

There are also calls for more educational content to be delivered in indigenous African languages, since the dominance of English in the tech world can be an extra barrier. No society progresses on the basis of a language only spoken by a minority of the population."
For instance, Asian countries have prospered while retaining their own languages. "If you want to make your profits," he told tech companies, "you have to work in depth with the people, not just counting numbers of mobile phones."

A survey of e-learning practitioners in Africa found that 83% use laptops daily to support learning, followed by mobile phones (71%), standalone PCs (67%), TVs (34%) and radios (31%). Tablets were down the list on 20%. Nearly half the respondents admitted they have experienced failure.

Shafika Isaacs, editor of the report, said: "We've had abundant examples of failure. The vast majority pointed to infrastructural and technological shortcomings. In Rwanda, as part of the One Laptop per Child project, I went to a rural school that claimed to have electricity. But when we got there, we found it only had one plug. We were meant to charge 1,200 laptops from that one plug."

Much work and research still has to be done to win over politicians to the e-learning cause, she added. "There is not yet a compelling case of the benefit of technology in education in an African context. There is anecdotal evidence. There is hype. There is PR." Despite success stories, the jury remains out on attempts by the world's leading ICT companies to transform education in Africa, and so too, must the Kenyan government proceed with caution in the implementation of the laptop project for Kenyan school children.

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