The Future of Africa’s Education is in the Hands of African Youth
In 1993, I was a second-grade student at St Paul’s Primary School, one of the top-ranked schools in northern Ghana. I remember clearly the unpainted and overcrowded classroom with limited resources as well as the fact that our teachers rarely showed up. The 2016 USAID report on Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) shows that […]
Leaving No One Behind: Empowering Women Through Education
Sustainable development begins with education which holds the key to achieving most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from healthy families to sustainable communities and peaceful societies. To achieve SDG 5 for gender equality and women’s empowerment we need first and foremost invest our effort in ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting […]
3 Ways Young Women are Transforming a Continent
By 2100, the global population is forecast to stand at over 11 billion1, and 4 billion of that number could be Africans2. The current population of sub-Saharan Africa is already well over 1 billion3, with an estimated median age of 194. This youth bulge, caused as child mortality rates fall but birth rates remain […]
To Fix Youth Unemployment in Africa, We Need to Build Skills in the Informal Sector
Unemployment is a silent trauma forging the common experience of my generation, and we are failing to create the conditions to change this reality. Instead, we are confined to a narrative of formal education and formal employment while our reality in Africa is overwhelmingly informal employment. Just like the mustard seed, informal employment grows […]
From Local Program to Global Network: How to Create a Professional Learning Community
During my PhD defense one of the examiners asked me what I would do after my PhD. My answer was that I would go back to Qatar and work with my scholarship provider, Qatar Foundation, to improve schools in Qatar. My PhD isn’t the magic wand to fix our education system however, I do believe […]
Nurturing Young Citizens’ Creativity in Media Use
We are living in a complex world where the rapid technological development of recent decades has brought major changes and challenges. One of the most important of these is the increasing mediatization of our lives: the media is ubiquitous and dominant in our everyday lives. Thanks to the internet, all-powerful companies like Google, Facebook, […]
Changing Current Paradigms of Media Education
Media literacy is now called upon to cope with the insidious and sometimes disturbing media phenomena: fake news, hidden algorithms, conspiracy theories, cyberbullying, problematic uses of social media and video games, digital divides, privacy protection, etc. This list is not exhaustive but highlights some issues that many initiatives set out to tackle in the spheres […]
The Second Digital Divide: Privileged Usage of Educational Technologies
Teachers have used signals technology – radio, film, television, computers, internet, mobile devices, and more – in classrooms for over a century. Researchers have investigated these cycles, both contemporaneously and in retrospect, and two important patterns stand out. First, when teachers have access to new technologies, they primarily use them to extend existing […]
Urban Brand-Utility: Making Advertising Educate and Contribute Towards a Sustainable Future
Not all learning is formal, via classrooms or online modules. Therefore, taking a broader view about education is a way to empower teachers, students, and society. With that in mind, when considering that most of us are part of a capitalist system, one can easily assume that advertising has by-and-large educated the masses to believe […]
Harnessing Technology to Bridge Gaps in Education
On 18 April 2018, a special painting workshop given by Yang Songshou, a famous Chinese painter, went online and attracted thousands of rural students to learn at the same time via the Internet. In this featured event of Shanghai EduExpo 2018, Yang was invited by Hu+ Project, an educational charity program initiated by Hujiang […]