
Our future is in safe hands! These young women – from left, Patricia Ngoy, Agang Ditlhogo, Carolyne Ekyarisiima – are so inspiring
This marked the fifth eLearning Africa to which I’ve been privileged to attend and give a presentation. It is one of the highlights of my year – learning about what is happening elsewhere in Africa in the eLearning space. The conference always attracts interesting speakers and participants, and the firm focus on Africa means that the solutions offered and the questions asked are relevant to our specific African context.
From 26-28 September this year, eLearning Africa was held in Mauritius, at the Intercontinental Hotel conference centre and resort to the north of the island. I was in need of some sea, sand and sun – and Mauritius does have these in abundance. So, I was pleased to be able to squeeze in early morning swims on the public beach near to my AirBnB some 20 minutes away from the resort. The water was warm, the weather balmy, the people friendly… and the conference was great too!
This year’s conference theme was Learning in Context, thus issues such as localisation, local language learning, decolonisation, site-specific technologies or adaptations and hyper-personalised solutions were at the forefront of many of the discussions.
I was presenting on our Fanz writing programme, which aims to not only boost local talent and provide opportunities for young aspirant writers, but also to create new local content for our readers. On fundza.mobi, we can see clearly that local content, which reflects the lives of our readers, is the content that works best to keep readers coming back for more.
Our research has also shown that being published on fundza.mobi not only helps young people develop their writing skills, but it also has a large impact on confidence and a sense of self. It was great to share our research and learnings with a receptive and interested audience.

No, there is nothing wrong with the eLearning Africa 2017 conference venue!
As always, there was a myriad of interesting, inspiring and amazing people and projects around. Here are just some of my highlights:
Bona Immaculate Maandera, who is studying at the University of Manchester, but who was helping teachers in Uganda use their mobile phones as learning devices in the classroom. I loved her enthusiasm for teaching and learning, and her creative use of simple technology to introduce new ways of learning into the classroom.
Dr Aida Opoku-Mensah, Special Advisor on Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, provided a brilliant overview of development in Africa, providing a mass of stats and information on what is happening, and on what needs to happen for our continent to thrive in the 21st century.
Patricia Ngoy, a Mandela Washington fellow from Kiongozi Group in DRC, gave an inspiring plenary address about growing up as a young woman with an interest in technology and the challenges that she faced in this male-dominated space. She’s now started a group to mentor young woman with an interest in technology and help them find employment in IT. Her dream is to launch the first African telecom company with women engineers executing all technical IT-related tasks. If her passion is anything to go by… she’s likely to do just that, and more too.
The panel talk ‘Empowering women and girls’ was probably the most inspiring of all the panels I attended. It included Patricia Ngoy, and also featured Agang Ditlhogo, from The Clicking Generation in Botswana, and Carolyne Ekyarisiima, from Apps and Girls in Tanzania. Agang’s organisation teaches young children and teens computing and technology skills. She’s also National Expert for the World Summit Award Organization (WSA), Ambassador for Africa Code Week and Ambassador for ITU Young Innovator Competition!
Carolyne’s social enterprise in Tanzania aims to bridge the tech gender gap by helping girls to code and to become leaders in their communities. She is also a Mandela Washington Fellow.
These young women were so impressive – not only for their technical skill – but also for their passion for teaching, learning, and women and girl empowerment. If the future of Africa is in their hands, we can feel incredibly safe and secure!
Another fantastic speaker was Taskeen Adam, from South Africa who is currently finishing her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Her presentation about MOOCs in the African context highlighted the need for decolonised online content, giving a comprehensive explanation of how these courses could be structured and evaluated.
eLearning Africa traditionally ends with a debate that follows the traditional Parliamentary style. The panel of speakers had to debate the following: ‘This house believes that grandiose Silicon Valley education initiatives have rarely taken account of local contexts and are not what Africa needs.’

Yoshi Nagasawa and I celebrate our earlier serendipitous meeting at eLearning Africa!
What I loved too were the informal chats and networking opportunities. It was wonderful to connect again with a range of people working on various educational initiatives in Africa, to see how their projects have expanded and grown.
From a very personal perspective, it was also lovely to spend time there with Yoshi Nagasawa. I’d first met him in May 2016 at eLearning Africa in Cairo. He’d enjoyed my presentation about FunDza and said that he was coming to South Africa and could he look me up. I gave him my card and some months later he connected with me and asked if he could come and intern at FunDza as part of a scholarship he’d received from the Japanese government. I said yes and he’s spent from May to October with us – building fundza.lite – an offline version of our fundza.mobi library. Hosting Yoshi has been so wonderful for FunDza. So, big thanks to eLearning Africa for helping us to first connect!