On September 13, ACET hosted its first intergenerational dialogue. Junior and senior high school students and recent graduates from across Africa were joined by policymakers and education specialists in a series of three panels and Q&A sessions on workplace skills gaps, digital skills, and soft skills. This article on digital skills is the second in a series of three articles with highlights from each panel.
The panel on digital skills offered the younger generations an opportunity to discuss their exposure to digital tools and skills in school and to take stock of what more is needed to ensure graduates are digitally literate and ready to take advantage of opportunities offered by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The panel was unanimous in its concerns over the general lack of access to digital resources in schools. Many of the students called out for more investment in digital infrastructure and tools, and more attention to digital literacy at all levels of the school curriculum. While the lack of access to digital skills training seemed to affect every student, the discussion underlined that there are also large disparities in digital skills training access between girls and boys.
Purity Musatila, an electronics engineer from shared her experience as the only female engineer in her company, where she often has as many as 50 male colleagues. The barriers she faced in school were caused by a lack of support for women and strong social norms that discourage girls from entering her field of work. Purity’s experience is in line with the findings from ACET’s recent study on barriers facing girls in employment in Africa, which documented many cases of girls being discouraged from courses deemed more ‘manly’, such as agricultural science and computing, or ones that require girls to spend more time in school, such as medicine. Fanta Darboe, an environmental activist pursuing a Bachelor’s degree at the University of the Gambia, echoed the concerns about the underfunding of digital skills training at all levels of education. She added that fewer female students seem to be motivated to specialize in digital skills training and many lacked opportunities to improve their digital skills.
Mustapha Abdul-Aziz, from the Northern Region of Ghana, recently completed his BSc in Nursing. He explained that there are many ways that the fourth industrial revolution has already affected the nursing profession, with many complex digital devices in hospitals and the rise of telemedicine, which allows people to get medical services remotely – but is also being used as a learning platform for medical students. As technology becomes more fundamental, he warned that those that are not exposed to the right digital skills will quickly lag behind and miss out on crucial learning opportunities.
Youth Voices
The problem is the lack of provision of ICT infrastructure and services. Affordability is a major challenge that should be addressed by governments through funding mechanisms at all levels of education.
Everiste Gahima (audience member)
My concerns are with the affordability of digital tools by schools, learners, and communities. This is still a challenge, especially in Uganda. How can the high cost and lack of affordability and access to ICT tools be addressed?
Emmy Daniel Ojara, audience member
The lack of access to digital systems is increasing the disparity between poor and well-resourced countries and between people within the same country. National development plans and resource allocation frameworks in countries should strategically and deliberately prioritize rolling out digital systems in the education sector, health, agriculture, etc. This will help African youth to fully explore the potentials/ opportunities to be meaningfully engaged in personal and national development.
Karara Benon (audience)
African education is giving us more knowledge than wisdom, they don’t create clear avenues for practical training for the job market unless you go to the vocational training institutes.
Fanta Jatta Sowe, audience member
At our school, we have not been taught about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I’d like to be taught digital marketing or social marketing, business data analytics, and coding.
Melissa Obeng-Kyereh, 12, panel member
Policymaker’s Response
Dr. Christine Niyizamwiyitirira, head of the department of ICT in Education at the Rwanda Education Board, is responsible for ICT in Education policy implementation. Rwanda stood out in the ACET report Strengthening Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution as a country with significant progress on digital skills development.
In Rwanda, we have a competence-based curriculum that incorporates ICT-related courses starting from the primary level. Our learners start to get basic digital literacy skills development at age seven, when they begin to interact with digital gadgets. We have run this curriculum since 2015, and are now updating it to include coding and robotics at an earlier age. We do not aim for everyone to become a computer scientist or engineer but put the focus on basic skills, so when learners get to a higher learning institution or technical vocational school, they are ready to focus on subject matters. In secondary schools we also offer ICT as a course, open to all. This helps learners sometimes for those interested to even go dig deeper into digital skills, where they can learn things like coding. We really need to equip the African youth with these digital skills and make sure they are confident and competent.
Key Takeaways
Digital tools and learning materials have to be better tailored to the local context, for instance by translating material into more local languages.
Providing basic digital literacy to all learners at the earliest levels can have a great positive impact on their overall skills development.
It is important to make sure digital tools are accessible and affordable to all – especially girls and learners in poor and remote communities who are being left behind.
The intergenerational dialogue was informed by the multi-country study Strengthening Education and Learning Systems to Deliver a 4IR-Ready Workforce, which builds on findings of the Mastercard Foundation report Secondary Education in Africa: Preparing the Youth for the Future of Work to map progress in strengthening secondary education systems to deliver a workforce prepared for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).
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