GHANA
Lectures in Accra and Winneba
November 2006
The Role of Open and Distance Learning in Breaking Barriers to National Development
Sir John Daniel with Joshua Mallet
Abstract
Development is the process of enhancing the freedoms the people can enjoy - both 'freedoms from' (e.g. hunger) and freedoms to (e.g. elect their government). For practical purposes the Commonwealth of Learning defines the aims of development as a combination of the Millennium Development Goals, the Dakar goals of Education for All, and the Commonwealth values of Peace, Democracy, Equality and Good Governance. Learning is fundamental to the achievement of all these goals, not only those directly related to education, but also those related to hunger, health and the fostering of democratic societies. Development is a massive challenge of learning but conventional methods of teaching cannot meet the scale of the challenge. Technology must be used to enhance and extend education just as it has transformed other areas of life. Using examples from Ghana the address will illustrate the use of technology, especially open and distance learning, to pursue development goals.
Introduction
How nice to back in Ghana. This is a country where I feel very comfortable, a country where I feel to be among friends.
I have clear memories of my previous visit. Going to Cape Coast Castle and passing through the "Gate of No Return", which has become more recently the "Gate of Return", was a vivid lesson in Ghanaian history. Later the same day we stopped in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere so that I could walk into a forest of cocoa trees. People appeared miraculously from nowhere to show me how to get at the cocoa beans so that I could taste them.
It is a pleasure to be back, a privilege to give this public lecture and a special thrill that the University of Education, Winneba, is conferring on me my first honorary degree from Africa. Thank you for the very warm welcome that you all have given to me.
My title today is The Role of Open and Distance Learning in Breaking Barriers to National Development. I have prepared these remarks with the help of my esteemed Ghanaian colleague Joshua Mallet and it is a pleasure to acknowledge his good contribution to the work of the Commonwealth of Learning. In the 1990s COL was privileged to have a most distinguished Ghanaian, Dr Esi Sutherland-Addy, as a member of its Board of Governors. We have strong links with your country.
How can open and distance learning break barriers to the national development of Ghana? I shall start by asking what we mean by development. We use the word often, but what do we mean by it? Development means increasing freedom. That's all there is to it. There are many sorts of freedom and many sorts of development. Some of the key development aims for Ghana are expressed in three sets of goals.
First come the eight Millennium Development Goals - proclaimed by the world's Heads of Government when they met at the United Nations in the year 2000. Second there are the six goals for education that were agreed at the World Forum on Education for All, also in the Millennium Year. Third, there are values espoused by the Commonwealth, the free association of 53 countries of which Ghana, the first African country to gain its independence from Britain, is a proud member.
Are there barriers to achieving these goals in Ghana that the Commonwealth of Learning can help to break down through open and distance learning? I shall show you how COL simplifies these goals in its Plan of work for 2006-09.
Many things are needed to make development happen, but one common need is learning - learning on a massive scale. That's why COL's new three-year plan for 2006-09 is called simply: Learning for Development. The challenge of learning is so huge that traditional methods of teaching are not enough to address it. Just as technology has helped us to improve the quantity and quality of products and services in other areas of human life, so we must now apply technology to learning. It is the only way we can meet the learning challenge.
The technology of open and distance learning has proved particularly successful because, if we can operate at some scale, it allows us to reach more learners with better quality teaching at lower cost. I shall show how educational technology and distance learning is being used by COL to promote learning for development in various areas, noting particularly what we are doing and propose to do here in Ghana.
I shall look for models for using technology; models that allow us to scale up learning so effectively that people copy them spontaneously - what we call self replication. For self replication to occur, people must to be able to do it themselves, with minimal outside involvement. The aim is for people to take charge of their own development - to achieve development without donors.
Development means learning. What kind of learning are we talking about? We need to learn different things. The Delors Report summed them up well as: learning to be, learning to know, learning to do, and learning to live together. Those types of learning are as important in Ghana as they are in the world outside. That is the plan of my talk.
Development as Freedom
So I go back to the beginning. What is development? Amartya Sen gives the answer in the title to his inspiring book Development as Freedom. He says that development and human freedoms are two sides of the same coin. Development simply means expanding the freedoms that people can enjoy. Sen adds that freedom is also what makes development happen. It is primarily through the free agency of people that development is achieved. Free people devote more energy to the development of their families, their communities and their countries than those who are not free. So according to Sen, the expansion of freedom is both the primary purpose and the principal means of development. What kinds of freedom are we talking about?
There is freedom from and freedom to.
The first freedom from is freedom from hunger. You cannot concentrate on much else if you are always worrying where your next meal is coming from. Hunger is a direct manifestation of poverty. Taking people out of abject poverty helps to free them from hunger and gives them other freedoms as well, notably some freedom from being pushed around by others and from having most of life's decisions made for them.
A second freedom from is freedom from disease. You can't achieve your potential if you are constantly sick. You can't develop your community if its members are constantly sick.
Another freedom is to live with a minimum of dirt, smoke and germs. There seems to be a paradox here. In rich parts of the world individual people consume more than their share of the earth's resources but live in nice clean environments with fresh water in the taps, clean air to breathe, and no piles of garbage to trip over. In developing countries individuals make fewer demands on resources but often have to live besides heaps of garbage, breathe foul air and make do with dirty water. Not long ago the dumping of toxic waste plunged your neighbour, Côte d'Ivoire, into a new crisis. People died because they were not free from pollution by others.
You can think of other 'freedoms from', but there are also 'freedoms to'.
There is the freedom to be treated as an equal to other members of society, especially the freedom for men and women to be treated as equals. This is something that can never be taken for granted. I am sure you have heard the story from Ghana's independence celebrations in 1957. The United States was represented by Vice-President Richard Nixon. After the ceremony he approached a group of black journalists and asked them 'how does it feel to be free?' 'We wouldn't know' one of them replied, 'we're from Alabama'.
There is the freedom to be educated, the freedom to choose who governs you, and the freedom to express yourself. These freedoms seem to be well-entrenched in Ghana. Last time I was here a Parliamentary Committee was interrogating ministers named by the President to assess their suitability. The questioning, which was admirably robust and candid, made for entertaining listening as we drove around the country. There is also the freedom to practice your religion. No doubt you can think of more 'freedoms to' as well, but this list of 'freedoms from' and 'freedoms to' begins to define what we mean by development.
Goals of Development
How can we express these freedoms as concrete aims that we can work towards? At the Commonwealth of Learning we blend three sets of goals.
First, are the Millennium Development Goals. These have targets for progress towards freedom from hunger and poverty, freedom from disease, freedom from pollution, the freedom to be equal and the freedom to be educated. The freedom to be educated was articulated in the six Dakar Goals of Education for All, or EFA, which cover all levels of education from early childhood through skills training to adult learning. Finally, some of the key 'freedoms to' are embraced in the values espoused by the Commonwealth: the freedom to live in peace, the freedom of democracy, the freedom of equality before the law, and the freedoms that flow from good governance.
The Commonwealth of Learning's Plan for 2006-09
In its plan for 2006-09 COL defines its work by combining these three frameworks into three sectors of activity in its Plan for 2006-09. The three sectors are Education, Learning for Livelihoods, and Human Environment. COL tries to help countries develop by pursuing four kinds of outputs and outcomes with them.
Outcomes: Policy - Systems - Models - Materials
First are policy outcomes. The longer COL exists, the clearer it is that governments and institutions will be more successful in using technology to expand learning for development if they first put some policies in place. This ensures that the hard questions are asked before projects start and makes it much more likely that the projects will be successful and sustainable.
Ghana has taken this lesson to heart. The President has set up a Special Initiative on Distance Learning which sets priorities for action, such as an open school for technical and vocational education. It also inventories what infrastructure and materials are available to achieve this. The Special Initiative on Distance Learning provides an excellent point of reference for COL's work here.
The second outcome we seek is better systems for technology-mediated learning. I give three examples in Ghana where you are developing distance learning systems in a very dynamic way. The University of Education, Winneba, was the first Ghanaian university to become a dual-mode system, teaching both on campus and at a distance. COL helps dual-mode systems to work effectively in many Commonwealth countries. Second, the University for Development Studies - potentially a tremendous asset to your nation - is integrating the system of eLearning into its work. COL is helping with the implementation of this system, both at the UDS and elsewhere in Africa. Third, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology launched its Faculty of Distance Education a year ago and COL will be helping get that system established too.
Our next output is models. Experience has taught us that it is enormously important to analyse new approaches to development as models, to identify the elements of the model and to assess their relative importance. This is crucial if you want to take an approach that has worked in Ghana and apply it somewhere else. Are the key elements of the model present in the new environment?
A consortium is an example of a model. Here in West Africa COL supports the West African Teacher Training Consortium (WATTC). But what makes a consortium work? Why do some consortia function well whilst others go nowhere? Analysing consortia as models can provide answers.
Finally, an important outcome for COL is the development of materials - not by COL but by others. Good learning materials are the basis for technology-mediated learning. They are the way of getting quality up and costs down. Once good materials exist they can be shared.
We have a nice example of that in Ghana. Materials developed in the Caribbean by the University of Technology, Jamaica, for a Diploma programme for technical and vocational education teachers have been upgraded and are now being used for a Bachelor's programme in the College of Technology Education of the University of Education, Winneba in Kumasi. This is a lovely example of a win-win situation. Sharing good materials around the Commonwealth is one element of COL's programme of work.
To summarise then, the Commonwealth of Learning helps countries pursue the development agenda by aiming for four types of outcomes in three sectors. But this is all a bit dry. Let me now illustrate the reality with real cases. I start with the Education Sector.
Education Sector
This is our biggest sector, where COL has five initiatives: Quality Assurance; Teacher Development; Open and Alternative Schooling; Higher Education and eLearning for Education Sector Development. Here I shall focus on just two, Teacher Development and Open or Alternative Schooling.
The Millennium Development Goals of Universal Primary Education and Gender Equity, as well as all the Dakar Goals, focus on Education.
Teacher Education
The major bottleneck to the achievement of universal primary education is the training and retraining of tens of millions of teachers. In the Commonwealth, there are 20 million teachers. Many of them need further training to be effective. Millions of new teachers must be recruited and trained as countries seek to expand education with a teaching force that is shrinking through retirement, migration and AIDS. Conventional methods of teacher education are not up to the scale of the challenge. ODL has already proven its effectiveness for training teachers in many countries. As I said earlier, Ghana is embarking on a major expansion of teacher education through distance learning.
It is a great honour to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Education, Winneba, which is in the forefront of this movement. Created by the amalgamation of seven colleges of education, the University of Education, Winneba is devoted solely to teacher education and is now operating through distance learning as well. I am particularly pleased that one of Winneba's distance learning programmes is a Bachelor of Education for Teachers of Technical and Vocational Subjects adapted from a Diploma programme for the Caribbean that COL developed with the University of Technology, Jamaica.
I was there when the first cohort to complete this programme, a group from the Bahamas, received their diplomas at the University's convocation in Kingston, Jamaica last year. The teachers told me that they felt greatly empowered as a result of the programme. They said that they now felt to be professional teachers, not merely people who could pass on technical skills. This year a group of teachers from St Kitts and Nevis also graduated. COL is proud to be helping with this new thrust, both at Winneba, elsewhere in Ghana and through our support for the West African Teacher Training Consortium which will hold its first joint meeting with TESSA in Winneba ten days from now.
Open and Alternative Schooling
The other initiative in our Education Sector programme that I must mention is Open and Alternative Schooling. This is an approach that Ghana is going to adopt for technical and vocational training under the President's Special initiative. No doubt some of the TVET teachers who train by distance learning will be involved in teaching at a distance in this new programme.
Open Schooling is the application of ODL at the school level; particularly the secondary school level, and is a very important activity for COL. In our Education Sector we attempt not only to promote the achievement of Universal Primary Education through the training of teachers by ODL but also to address the consequence of achieving Universal Primary Education, which will be to send a tidal wave of children towards secondary school.
Countries that struggle to achieve primary education will not be able to satisfy the growing demand for secondary education by conventional means through building schools, which is where open schooling comes in. Open schools go back much longer than open universities. Countries like New Zealand, Australia and Canada had open schools more than fifty years ago. However, it was the creation of the National Open School in India in the 1970s that began the modern era of open schooling. Today India's National Institute for Open Schooling has over a million children on its rolls and countries in Africa, as well as the states of India, now seek to emulate its success.
What is the model? How does the open school model differ from the open-university model?
First, secondary schoolchildren require more personal contact with tutors and facilitators than do university students, so there is greater emphasis on local centres. Second, open schools are directed as much at youngsters beyond school age who want to complete their school diplomas as at school-age children. Third, many of their pupils are disadvantaged in various ways: some have part-time employment, some have disabilities, some are homeless, and so on.
This means that when open schools say they use open and distance learning, they must emphasise the 'open' even more than the 'distance'. Pupils must be able to come in and out, fitting their studies with their often difficult lives.
From this has developed a final feature of open schools, namely that their study centres are often run by NGOs that take a special interest in disadvantaged children. This creates a win-win situation. The open school has a ready made network of study centres run by organisations and people that really care about the children, and the NGOs, through the open school materials, have a way of giving the children they serve a much richer educational experience. Many countries are now interested in creating or re-invigorating open schools, so this is a model of learning for development that will keep COL busy in the years ahead.
Learning for Livelihoods
Let me now turn to the second of COL's development sectors and give an example from that. We call that sector learning for livelihoods and it tries to address the most crucial of all development goals, the elimination of poverty and hunger. That is the first of the Millennium Development Goals, to halve, between 2000 and 2015, the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day and those who are hungry.
Lifelong Learning for Farmers
That means that the first step in development is to increase the income of the poorest people, in other words to improve their livelihoods. Literacy training and most forms of education improve people's livelihoods but COL always seeks the most direct link possible between learning and livelihoods. The place to start is with the farmers in the rural areas. If we can improve the livelihoods of tens of millions of farmers and smallholders we shall transform the rural economy and with it the prosperity of the whole world. But I want to talk today about another model, which we call Lifelong Learning for Farmers, or L3Farmers for short. This takes a deeper look at the rural economy and involves more of its components.
The initiative was based on the premise that a way must be found to give farmers, who are the heart of the rural economy, easier access to information and knowledge that could help them increase their livelihoods. Even where they exist, agricultural extension services are too understaffed to address the challenge. The result is that the wealth of information resulting from agricultural research and development fails to travel the last mile to where it is most needed, the villages of the developing world.
In the last few years many villages in India have been equipped with ICT kiosks as a result of government interventions or commercial initiatives. Since each kiosk provides its village with internet and telephone connections, COL asked itself whether these kiosks might help to carry useful information that last mile to the individual farmer. We began by studying the impact of introducing ICT kiosks in four regions of India. The results were clear. The kiosks had not had as big an impact as hoped. The reason was that they had been introduced in a top-down manner without involving local communities.
So the first principle we adopted was to mobilise the farmers, to get them to form an association and create a vision of development for their village. Our role is then to help them achieve that vision. The vision includes their view of how their farming could give them better livelihoods. It might be acquiring better livestock, growing new crops, or simply improving the process of marketing their produce. That produces questions. They are often apparently simple questions. How do I identify a good cow? How do I keep wild boars off my land when they are a protected species?
The next step is to get the information providers to work together to answer these questions. In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, for example, we helped to create a consortium of the Agricultural University, the Open University, the Veterinary University, a large Engineering University and the University of Madras. These institutions had been used to operating separately and ineffectively in their relationships with farmers. Now they work together.
The ICT kiosks are used to link the farmers to the consortium. These are commercial ICT kiosks and we prefer it that way. It makes the operation sustainable and creates another stakeholder, the kiosk operator, who has an interest in providing information of value that the farmers are prepared to pay for, such as very local weather forecasts.
The fourth key element is to involve the commercial banks. In India the banks are under pressure from government to increase rural lending but the record of repayment has been poor. However, the banks felt that the L3 Farmers system gave them a better assurance of repayment and so they became thoroughly involved, not just in making loans, but in getting other businesses involved to improve the marketing of the produce.
So, to give a concrete example, the farmers in a village near the town of Theni in Tamil Nadu formed an association and decided that improving dairy production was their best route to greater prosperity. Their key question to the information providers was 'how do I tell a good milk cow from a poor milk cow?' The specialists worked together and came up with a check list with diagrams which the women of the village, who have learned some web programming, made into an instructional sequence on the computer in the ICT kiosk.
The bank loaned money to the farmers to improve their dairy cows, some $US 200,000 so far, and also brought in a diary company from the nearby town which agreed to buy a guaranteed quantity of milk and take it to market provided that the farmers agreed to meet certain quality standards. The net result is a more prosperous and happy village, banks that are so pleased with the results that they are replicating the system in other villages without COL's involvement, and ICT kiosk operators who are making a living too.
This is not conventional open and distance learning, but it is a successful way of improving the rural economy. It is technology assisted learning for development. We are not running this programme in Ghana yet, but COL is helping with the training of extension officers in safe use of agro-chemicals for vegetable cultivation through print and radio broadcast in some local languages.
The Human Environment Sector
I come finally to COL's Human Environment Sector. In the human environment sector we include the Commonwealth goal of equality and the MDG on gender parity and gender equity.
This sector includes our work in environmental education, which is mainly focused in India at the moment but will soon spread around the Commonwealth through the distance learning Green Teacher Diploma that we have developed and tested with India's Centre for Environmental Education.
It also includes governance, where we are helping to scale up public sector training. Here in Ghana this includes the development of an ODL training package for police recruits and new constables in Communication Skills, Report Writing, HIV/AIDS and Entrepreneurship, in partnership with the National Police Training School. Today I shall concentrate on one initiative in this sector, which is Health, Welfare and Community Development.
Three MDGs are concerned with freedom from disease: freedom from dying in infancy; freedom from dying while giving birth; and freedom from avoidable diseases like AIDS, malaria and polio. Freedom from abject poverty is a start towards achieving the health freedoms. The freedom to be educated and trained also helps in attaining the freedom of better health. Clearly, improving health services is important for reaching these goals. But achieving them also depends on people learning how to avoid disease and keep themselves and their children healthy. Here in Ghana COL plans to help to develop ODL for the training of community health nurses. They will help to improve health services and also to teach people how to avoid disease.
Media Empowerment
To avoid disease people must have information that they can understand; not just because it is presented in their own language, but because it is rooted in their culture - even if it challenges some of the habits of that culture. This is the basis of COL's Media Empowerment programme, but before I explain the details, let me say a word about the general approach that COL tries to use in harnessing the power of technology to learning.
COL works with its partners to find ways of using technology that meet at least three criteria. First, we look for or develop applications of technology that are scaleable. For us the whole point of using technology is to create learning opportunities for many more people. Nearly all development goals require very large numbers of people to learn new things. Conventional face-to-face teaching cannot be scaled up to meet the challenge. Technology is only useful if it can be scaled up.
Second, we want models for using technology that are sustainable. That means the technology must be robust, it must be suited to the environment, and its maintenance and updating must not have to rely on external funding.
Third, it must be locally organised. To begin with, this helps to achieve the goals of scalability and sustainability. Anything that depends on outsiders will be limited in impact and inherently fragile. Local people must take responsibility. This also ensures that the use of technology and the messages and learning that it transmits, will be culturally and linguistically appropriate.
Those three goals are essential but we try to aim for a fourth, which is to create a model that is self-replicating. I mean that the application is so obviously effective and powerful that people copy it spontaneously. COL is a small agency that can only act in a very few places. But if people copy the models we put in place we can have a big multiplication effect. COL is not concerned with who gets the credit; we simply want to scale up learning for development.
So I come back to our Media Empowerment programme. The idea is simple - most good models for using technology are! We believe that messages about avoiding disease and keeping well will be most effective if they are developed and put out by local people. The most powerful media for this are mass media: TV or video; radio or audio. So the challenge is simply to equip a suitable local group with video equipment: camera, editing suite, projector and so on, and train them to use it in an effective and sustained way. Or we do the same thing with community radio.
I can give real examples from The Gambia and Sierra Leone that are the work of my colleague David Walker. The aim is to help these West African countries tackle the challenge of HIV/AIDS, a development disaster that risks wiping out development gains already made.
The first task is to find a suitable local group. To find it we consult the World Health Organisation, which knows the health situation in each country and the Non-Governmental Organisations that are already working to improve it. In The Gambia and Sierra Leone and we have been worked with NGOs that are linked to Nova Scotia in Canada. They are now fully equipped and trained with TV equipment and are producing videos of health messages with their drama troupe.
What about scalability? For that COL has developed a model that we call Village Cinema. Again, it is very simple. You go into a village, hang up a sheet between two trees, wait until it is dark and then project the videos using a small diesel generator if there is no other power. We have most experience of using this model in The Gambia. There some 60% of the entire population of the country has seen village cinema presentations about AIDS and malaria produced by the NSGA. The Government of the Gambia believes that the effect of this initiative has been to arrest the increase of HIV infections and increase dramatically the number of families avoiding malaria by using insecticide treated bed nets.
You may not immediately think of this combination of Media Empowerment and Village Cinema as distance learning, but the name doesn't matter. It is an effective way of using technology to scale up learning in support of development. Media empowerment, as its name implies, empowers local people to address the challenges facing them.
Conclusion
So there it is. Our title was the Role of Open and Distance Learning in Breaking Barriers to National Development. I hope we have shown you that distance education has a huge role to play in progressing the development agenda and that there are many manifestations of open and distance learning. I have given you just a few of the models that COL is using.
The kind of development we are seeking is development that increases human freedom in many dimensions. The condition for developing those freedoms is a massive increase in human learning. Conventional methods of teaching are not up to the task. Commonwealth nations have the opportunity to harness the potential of ODL to advance development.
Learning is the common wealth of humankind. Our task is both to increase that wealth and to ensure that is not the private preserve of favoured individuals or institutions but indeed the common wealth of humankind. I wish the people and institutions of Ghana every success as they take up the challenge.