Page 125 - Education in a Digital World

112 International Development

US government’s ‘USAID’ programme has long been focused on education –
directing over US$925 million to basic education in forty-three countries in 2010,
and an additional US$200 million to higher education (USAID 2011). Tellingly, as
with all US aid, these monies are used to enable local and national recipients to
work in partnership with American ‘interests’ such as universities and colleges, private
firms, foundations and other bilateral and multilateral donors.
These forms of governmental aid programmes and funding play a significant role
in setting the educational agendas in recipient countries. As Bjorn Nordtveit (2010,
p.326) notes, most low-income countries “do not have the economic possibility to
finance education by their own resources and are therefore to a large extent
dependent on international discourses”. As described above, the discursive framing
of much of the overseas aid work that has taken place during the 2000s and 2010s
has been framed by the UN’s ‘Millennium Development Goals’– especially the
stated need to ensure universal primary education, gender equality, assisting pro-
gression to higher education, and improving the quality and quantity of technical
and vocational education. Within all of these priorities, it can be noted how edu-
cational technology has become a significant component of international aid efforts
over the past twenty years or so regardless of country or context.
For example, from the 1990s onwards USAID developed a growing portfolio of
technology-related initiatives. Under its stated aim of “help[ing] more children and
teachers use education technology for improved learning”, USAID developed and
ran a ‘Global Learning Portal’ programme during the 2000s to support teachers
around the world to access shared teaching materials and other educational resources.
Under its US$15 million ‘Digital Opportunity through Technology and Commu-
nication Partnerships’ project (otherwise known as the ‘DOT-COM’ programme),
USAID has also supported local recipients of aid funding in the broadly defined area
of ‘learning systems’ to work with US educational organisations and corporations
such as Sun, IBM, Intel and ThinkQuest. Similar educational technology-related
programmes and projects feature in the international aid profiles of most other
developed ‘donor’ countries. The UK government, for example, also has an estab-
lished record of focusing on technology in education through its Department for
International Development – not least through its ‘Imfundo’ initiative during the 2000s
that saw the implementation of various technology-based education programmes
throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
These efforts notwithstanding, perhaps some of the most significant recent efforts
in this area have come through the NEPAD ‘e-Schools’ initiative. This ambitious
Africa-wide programme was launched at the Africa Summit of the 2003 World
Economic Forum, seeking to extend internet connectivity and technology-related
teacher training to around 600,000 high schools over a ten-year period. Since then,
the initiative has been implemented in seventeen African nations with a stated aim
of “impart[ing] ICT skills to young Africans in primary and secondary schools as
well as harness[ing] ICT technology to improve, enrich and expand education in
African countries”. In practice, the programme started with an initial ‘demonstration