Livelihoods & Health

Livelihoods & Health is one of COL's two programme sectors. Improving the livelihoods and health of millions of people is a central challenge of development. The four initiatives in this sector - Skills development, Learning for farming, Healthy Communities and Integrating eLearning - are supported by ODL, which can scale up quality learning in a cost-effective manner and help make remote and resource-poor communities more productive.

Skills Development

Youth unemployment is a global challenge. Forty-five percent of the world’s young people without work, many of them young women, live in the Asia and Pacific regions. In Africa, the challenge is to find productive employment for 7 to 10 million new entrants to the labour market every year. In Kenya and Tanzania, for example, the annual number of young people joining the labour forces is respectively 500,000 and 700,000. Eighty percent of jobs worldwide require technical and vocational skills, yet skills training is 14 times more expensive than general secondary education in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Fiji, only 0.36% of the education budget is devoted to technical and vocational education and training.

The challenge is to provide cost-effective and flexible learning opportunities to large numbers of people. Successful ODL models can be replicated and shared in other jurisdictions.

COL advocates the development of national and institutional policy for the use of ODL in order to scale up opportunities for skills development.

In 2009-2012, COL will:

work with institutional partners to design and deliver quality ODL courses and foster greater use of ICTs in such courseware;
make materials available as open educational resources to be shared and adapted around the Commonwealth;
create needs-based ODL training materials for skills development to enhance the livelihoods of communities;
provide training in course writing, tutoring and learner support; and
foster partnerships between Commonwealth institutions at different stages of development with a focus on south-south co-operation.

www.col.org/SkillsDevelopment

Learning for Farming

Of the 1.1 billion people living on less than $1 a day, 75% live in rural areas and rely on agriculture for both food and income. In developing countries, 80% of farm work is done by women. Yet, women farmers receive only 5% of agricultural extension services and are under-represented in training programmes. To promote agriculture for development requires a strengthening of the capacity, skills and resources of smallholders and institutions, as well as mobilisation of political support on a large scale.

COL’s Lifelong Learning for Farmers model promotes prosperity by blending social capital and banking services with the innovative use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This model can enable many thousands of poor farmers, men and women, to learn and earn.

COL continues to refine, adapt and extend its successful model for improving rural prosperity: Lifelong Learning for Farmers (L3F). The model links universities, research institutes and banks with rural communities so that farmers can access vital information, gain skills and build social-learning capital oriented to new economic opportunities.

To roll out the model at scale in 2009–2012, COL will:

adopt/adapt the L3F model in different jurisdictions
train a cadre of “knowledge info-mediaries” to scale up the L3F model;
work upstream by helping agricultural universities use ODL to design better education and training programmes;
help research organisations to apply science to the challenges of rural development and to provide services to resource-poor communities;
consolidate and scale up pilot grassroots activities through policy advocacy and capacity-building; and
work with a global network of strategic partners to promote L3F and extend the use of knowledge info-mediaries.

www.col.org/L3Farmers

Healthy Communities

The international community has declared its commitment to reverse the spread of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. However, infection rates continue to rise globally, debilitating productive capacity. The rate of HIV infection in Commonwealth countries is twice the world average.
Six African Commonwealth countries lose an average of 4% of their teachers to AIDS each year. Some 500 million people develop malaria each year, 90% of them in Sub-Saharan Africa and 6% in India, and as many as 3 million – mostly children – die of it. Newer health threats are equally serious: the International Diabetes Federation and the World Health Organization predict that 380 million people will develop diabetes by 2025. In Kiribati, diabetes already accounts for 8% of deaths.

There is clearly an urgent need for more learning about health. Most resource-poor communities in the Commonwealth have inadequate access to the Internet as a facility for learning. Local community-based media, however, which countries such as Bangladesh, Botswana, Kenya, India and Tanzania now permit, can be a powerful means of promoting learning for health.

Good health is a prerequisite for learning and earning a livelihood. Throughout the Commonwealth, disease and illness take an enormous toll on education systems, livelihoods and productivity. COL aims to increase access to appropriate information, knowledge, learning materials and tools, enabling better community responses to HIV/AIDS and other health and development challenges, particularly in remote and resource-poor areas.

In 2009–2012, COL will:

work with key actors in ICT/media, health, development and education to develop quality content that will be freely available as open education resources;
use media for education and training as well as well as to communicate health messages;
develop the capacities of knowledge info-mediaries (healthcare and extension workers, local media and development agents, teachers and other community leaders) to reach larger numbers of people in the community;
scale up its longstanding Media Empowerment programme by training health groups to create and share quality learning materials and media content; and
build in research and evaluation so as to share knowledge and foster the development of model practices and policies.

www.col.org/HealthyCommunities

Integrating eLearning

Governments are increasingly integrating ICT into their education and training systems and institutions, individuals and communities are aiming to use ICT confidently and creatively to achieve their respective goals and participate in the global community.

In 2009-2010, COL supports governments, institutions, individuals and communities to:

use digital technologies;
design and develop learning materials that are made available, where possible, as open education resources;
apply low-cost ICT training models; and
provide effective and appropriate skills training.

It also builds communities of practice and facilitates collaborative content development and sharing.

COL supports the development of open education resources, and approaches and uses of technologies that facilitates open and distance learning (ODL).