Stakeholders enroute Dakar for eLearning Africa-09

The annual symposium on electronic Learning (e-Learning), will next month gather stakeholders at the capital city of Senegal, Dakar, for eLearning Africa 2009.

The event scheduled to hold between May 27 and 29 at the Hotel Le Méridien in Dakar, is expected to attract who-is-who in the continent’s Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) inspired learning and is being organized in collaboration with the Senegalese state IT agency ADIE (Agence de l’Informatique de l’Etat).

A press statement from the organizers and made available to ITRealms Online said that the pan-African conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training, is on its fourth year running.

ADIE Director, Tidiane Seck, affirmed that Senegal is delighted to once more host this year’s event.

“It will provide the opportunity to show what we can do, as well as discover the initiatives of other countries in terms of eTraining. I believe that experience-sharing is the best way to convince people who are reluctant or skeptical,” Seck said.

According to the director, ADIE’s mission is to encourage the use of new technology within government but also, more broadly, by all citizens.

Citing for instance that for this purpose, the agency has set up an online training platform for both government personnel and corporate staff where everyone could develop their skills throughout their careers.

Also, Seck noted that at eLearning Africa 2009, major education institutions from Senegal will present to an international audience what the country has done to train government civil servants as well as what is happening in universities and in the medical field.

In terms of infrastructure, the director said, this is possible thanks to the government’s intranet resource centre, which is currently being completed.

Equally, ADIE director disclosed that five Senegalese universities will very shortly be interconnected through fibre optics, thus being able to provide real-life teleconference experiences for training purposes. Pointing out that with such infrastructure available, a professor at Dakar University will be able to lecture to astudents in Ziguinchor or elsewhere in the country.

In the medical field, Seck said that information technology is already being used very broadly to exchange skills between establishments and also for training purposes, citing the instance of deploying ICT for telemedicine, saying it will be just some of the many successful experiences that will be shared at eLearning Africa.

ITRealms Online recalls that over the years, eLearning Africa has established itself as the key event on ICT for development, education and training on the African continent, with the mission of bringing people together who are actively engaged in education and in the implementation of learning technologies in schools, universities, corporate training programmes as well as in education in the public sector.

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