This interview with Ms Aida Opoku-Mensah, Officer-in-Charge of the Development Information Services Division at the UN Economic Commission for Africa by Beate Kleessen of the eLearning Africa editorial team, seems to cover the practial issues involved in the development of eLearning in Africa. (www.elearning-africa.com)

The Economic Commission for Africa was established in 1958, ECA is one of five regional commissions under the administrative direction of United Nations (UN) headquarters. As the regional arm of the UN in Africa, it is mandated to support the economic and social development of its 53 member States. Aida Opoku-Mensah is Officer-in-Charge of the Development Information Services Division at the UNECA. Her ICT Team is primarily responsible for implementing the African Information Society Initiative (AISI) and develops practical strategies and programmes that will help lead Africa towards the realisation of digital inclusion.

Aida Opoku-Mensah: "The ECA is implementing the Africa Information Society Initiative (AISI), which is driven by critical development imperatives, focusing on priority strategies, programmes and projects that can assist in building African information societies. A key component of the AISI is the development of national e-strategies or the National Information and Communication Infrastructure (NICI) plans. National e-strategies are useful for facilitating national development, depending on the kind of environment that exists. This includes the need for sound and operative legal and regulatory frameworks and the provision of the necessary resources, financial and otherwise. Security procedures and supporting legislation to facilitate the utilisation of data should also be in place. Market liberalisation and - in some instances - deregulation are necessary and useful to attract investment and encourage entrepreneurship and ICT innovation.

AISI also represents a mechanism for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Africa. Seven of the eight MDGs were addressed by the AISI document, such as poverty eradication, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, as well as universal primary education.

As the Information Society evolves in Africa, education needs to take centre stage because it is required to address new challenges in preparing young learners to participate in local and global knowledge and information societies and economies. Therefore, failure to change our education system with respect to the Information Society will have dire consequences for Africa.

There will be no future generation of leadership to guide African institutions in the global Information Society. African intellectuals will be active mainly in the universities and corporations of the North and other developing regions that have adjusted to the Information Society. That is, the Continent will have a massive brain drain beyond the proportions we have seen in recent times; and African children, male and female, will have little or no access to global knowledge and no capacity to exploit that knowledge or generate and defend their own livelihoods.

African Development Forum (ADF), convened in Addis Ababa in October 1999 and this led to the creation of an ECA-led African Learning Network, ALN, based on three pillars.

• SchoolNet Africa, which is now functioning in 23 African countries, supports national and regional school networking activities. It was launched in October 2001 in Johannesburg.
• OOSYNet is a youth networking initiative that addresses the needs of Out-of-School Youth (OOSY) at both the national and regional level.
• VarsityNet establishes connectivity at universities and related institutions of higher learning and research. It is intended to stimulate the development of content production and information sharing within this environment.

There are, however, some stark realities with respect to Africa meeting the MDGs. It is estimated that in order for sub-Saharan Africa to reach these goals, aid will have to increase in real terms from last year’s level of just under US$25 billion to US$37 billion this year, and then climb steadily to US$73 billion by 2015.

All forms of financing and investment are required, and you cannot rely on one source of funding alone. There should be a mix of public investment and domestic resource mobilisation and support through development cooperation and other forms of international financing, which can at best go into social sectors such as education and health. The real investments have to come from within countries in order to stimulate a clement business climate, which in turn would nurture local private sectors and generate real wealth for the benefit of Africa."