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Recently I have participated in the eLearning Conference held between 24 and 26 May 2006 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: http://www.eLearning-Africa.com it was an excellently organized Conference and if it was for me to judge, rather one of the best events that I attended outside our golden ivory European tower.
In the past I would be sticking more to the differences – now I look more to the commonalities. In the past I would be looking to the poverty – real or relative of Africa. Now, it is time to look deeper into our European poverty and the false paradigms we are providing to the people. No need to continue feeding our sustainability delusions, as long as these relate only to money – money is only a means to an end, and what we are all witnessing is that if it is regarded as an end in itself, it leads only to problems. There is also no need to take a radical approach to issues that we are all of us fed up with. However, there is still some room for improving our ways of approaching our jobs, be it research or commerce or both.
The shadow capital on which Africa should build its e-Learning infrastructure is the mistakes we have made (and at a great extent continue to make) in Europe. Africa does not need to live with and experience all the deficiencies faced in regard to e-Learning as this has been introduced in several national or application contexts in Europe. In Europe we have been accumulating lessons and are in a position today to provide useful advice and recommendations to the developing nations of the African continent.
According to a recently published research by the Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, aid to Africa “does more harm than good”, showing that all these generous Help and Support Frameworks to Africa lead in many cases to almost nothing.
[ http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html – see also: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/14/1037080848089.html?oneclick=true
James who is 35 years old, seems to have come to a more important conclusion from his research work than myself that I am 2 years older …]
And to a great extent they were solutions in search of a problem, expressions of charity from a society that has been hypocritically hiding its big (lack of) cohesion and conscience problems.
The idea is not of increasing the wealth of European stakeholders that shall begin to sell in Africa but to understand that growth in Africa can support growth in Europe.
We all are aware of the growth inefficiencies we currently face in Europe; Africa is not a new market for us to sell (and for them to buy). This would be a serious mistake that would sooner or later drive us in structural diseconomies which we’d better not face.
There is a fear, at least as far as I can see that we might end up in a new type of technological colonialism that shall create many more new problems in comparison to those the traditional colonialism created as long as it lasted, some of which we still experience. The antidote: to plan and collaborate with a long-term perspective.
Is this so difficult? The answer is unfortunately yes. We all of us got so used to think big that we lost our ability to think small. To encourage many small-scale low-budget projects with different approaches and avoid big projects that have to become a success (even if they are a failure since the time of their planning…).
If you support people in a small scale project and these fail to achieve anything, you might have helped them become something like small level crooks. But if you give them all the means to cover a several millions failure, then you are teaching them to become big time crooks. Unfortunately common sense is not visiting our consciences.
One of my recent pleasures came from reading a poem – Sailing to Byzantium by W. B. Yeats. [ http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/781 ] Dating back to the time of symbolism, this poem is a good source of inspiration to all of us: the educated ones who lost the threads of their interests and their values in hunting for (more) money, as well as the non educated ones who can at least claim some basic knowledge of poetry at its best.
That is no time for old men.
Adamantios Koumpis, akou@altec.gr
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