By Dr Tony Mays
Director: Education COL
Open and distance learning is a key mechanism for reaching learners who are unable to access in-person provision, especially persons with disabilities, women and girls, and learners in remote areas.
The University of South Africa recently hosted its third regional symposium on “Redefining and Reimagining our Futures.” This hybrid event included COL’s participation in a panel discussion on the subtopic “Social Justice and Futuristic Projects for Access to Education.”
Based on recent work completed by COL in southern Africa, I reflected on the role of traditional systems and authorities in promoting access to education in the discussion.
There is some truth in the conventional wisdom (from Noah’s Ark to The Field of Dreams) that if you build it, they will come. We may offer a new open and distance learning (ODL) programme and be pleased to have hundreds, sometimes even thousands, register. However, if we take the time to analyse that enrolment, we may well find that the majority who took up the opportunity are people who could have made other choices for their studies. A blanket marketing campaign may not reach the most marginalised learners.
Various barriers still need to be overcome to enable access for the most marginalised.
For example, in Tanzania, many girls dropped out of the schooling system due to teenage pregnancy. Even though the Institute of Adult Education and its hundreds of affiliate colleges offered a mechanism for a return to formal education, it took the development of a special learning pathway and an active community-based recruitment campaign organised through local authorities to grow enrolment.
In Rwanda, the government instituted an active campaign to recruit young mothers back into formal education. One of the crucial elements for the enrolment and effective retention of these young mothers was creating mentoring support groups. COL published a report on this in 2023.
In Nigeria, a research-based initiative in partnership with the University of Nigeria found that while there are options for a return to formal learning, rural communities may still need to be made aware of these opportunities and maybe cannot access them easily. The initiative used motorbikes to reach some of these communities. Solar-powered narrowcasting was utilised to communicate a call to a central place and engage learners, parents, and local leaders about their learning needs. This information was used to develop micro-learning opportunities that spoke directly to expressed learning needs and could be provided in context.
In Botswana, COL supported the College of Open Schooling in developing content for its Moodle-based open learning portal. However, in analysing enrolment and retention, it was found that girls were underrepresented and underachieving in the Kang Region. It was discovered that there was a need for both an advocacy campaign, in which a local chief played a critical role and the development and dissemination of additional offline resources to address the issue.
In a similar vein, COL supported a community outreach campaign through the 59 tinkhundla (local authorities) in Eswatini, which reached 15,964 community members and resulted in a steady increase in enrolment with the Emlalatini Development Centre, reversing a previous trend of declining enrolment.
Also, in Malawi, having recognised the value of digital curriculum-based OER during the pandemic, the Directorate of Distance Education has made digitisation of curriculum content and creating public Wi-Fi access points in each community a key national strategy. However, barriers for girls remain that need to be addressed through community-based advocacy, recruitment, and mentoring processes. COL currently supports 500 girls registered with the Malawi College of Distance Education in this way.
As noted by researchers at the World Bank, if we want to increase access for the most marginalised, we need to understand the barriers to access and address them through targeted community-based advocacy and support approaches using a variety of engagement strategies.
