Publication: Connecting Africa’s Universities to Affordable High-Speed Broadband Internet: What Will it Take?
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2020-12-11
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2020-12-18
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Connecting African universities to affordable, high speed broadband internet is essential for attaining the goals of the digital economy for Africa moonshot, which aims to ensure that all African individuals, businesses, and governments are digitally enabled by 2030. Access to the Internet promotes economic growth, improvements to education and knowledge dissemination, and overall human development. The advanced digital skills of high quality, that are needed to adapt and exploit digital technologies, will need to be produced through reformed university programs and rapid skills development programs. Intermediate level digital skills that are needed on a broad scale for the diffusion of technologies will be produced on a large scale when all African tertiary level students (not just those in science and engineering courses) acquire adequate levels of digital competence. African universities need broadband in order to expand coverage, through blended and online learning; improve the quality of higher education; encourage the use of technology in higher education; and provide access to the enormous wealth of digital education resources available in the world and enable Africans to contribute their own digital content. Connecting Africa’s universities will also have spillover effects on the broader education system, especially secondary schools and technical-vocational institutions, where teachers and students need to acquire intermediate and basic digital skills.
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“Bashir, Sajitha. 2020. Connecting Africa’s Universities to Affordable High-Speed Broadband Internet: What Will it Take?. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/34955 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Publication Feasibility Study to Connect All African Higher Education Institutions to High-Speed Internet(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07-16)The Government of Cote d’Ivoire considers information and communications technology (ICTs) as a key instrument for national development. Youth education and training are high priorities for Cote d’Ivoire. Through its national development plan Cote d’Ivoire aspires to become an ICT leader in the region. Access to quality higher education is considered a primary vehicle to equip the population with the necessary skills to promote the social and economic development of Cote d’Ivoire. As part of the digital economy for Africa (DE4A) initiative, the World Bank commissioned a feasibility study to develop an operational roadmap to connect all African higher education institutions (HEIs) to high-speed Internet. 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Higher education institutions (HEIs) in Burkina Faso lack adequate bandwidth to meet their research and education needs because the available broadband is expensive and insufficient to address their needs. As part of the digital economy for Africa (DE4A) initiative, the World Bank commissioned a study to develop an operational roadmap to connect all African HEIs to high-speed Internet. As part of the feasibility study, this report provides a detailed country-level assessment to connect all HEIs in Burkina Faso to high-speed Internet. Chapter one is introduction, the report provides a country overview in chapter two to provide the national context. The connectivity gap has both a supply-side and a demand-side is chapter three explores the demand-side, focusing on information and communications technology (ICT) in the education sector and the challenges impacting the use of information and communication technologies for teaching, learning, and research - creating the pull factors; and chapter four examines the supply-side, the ICT sector’s key components and the challenges affecting high-speed connectivity. Chapter five presents a high-level summary of the status of national research and education network (NREN) as well as its achievements and limitation in delivering high-speed connectivity to HEIs. Drawing on findings from the earlier chapters, chapter six discusses the cost of connecting all HEIs in Burkina Faso to high-speed Internet. A summary is given in chapter seven, followed by the appendices.
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