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MOBILE PHONES IN AFRICA: TRANSFORMING SOCIETY AND (MAYBE) EDUCATION
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MOBILE PHONES IN AFRICA:
TRANSFORMING SOCIETY AND (MAYBE) EDUCATION
Alexander Romiszowski
(Educational Technology 47/3, May-June 2007, pp60-61
An African Scenario from 2003
The country is Mozambique. The year is 2003. I was contracted to perform a baseline study and evaluate progress on the planning and implementation of an “Open School” pilot project. This was in the predominantly rural and sparsely populated Province of Nampula, situated in the North of the country. At that time, only about 6% of the secondary school age children of Mozambique were graduating from high school, partly because of limited access to secondary schools, partly due to high rates of drop-out. But that was the national average - the situation in Nampula was much more serious. Only around 3% of secondary school age children were even entering secondary education, and this was because the few existing secondary schools could accommodate no more than 3% of the potential candidates. The primary school system, which had to be almost totally rebuilt from scratch since the end of the civil war a decade or so before, was approaching the UN’s Millennium Development Goals of universal access. But the secondary and high school systems still had a long way to go.