The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been adopted by the United Nations as the key development targets for the first part of the 21st century. All nations are on board.
Among the most prominent of these goals are those that relate to achieving basic education, building on the Education For All (EFA) initiative begun in Jomtien (Thailand) in 1990, and reaffirmed at a second EFA meeting in Dakar in 2000.iv The MDGs have gone further in proposing goals that integrate not only education, but also extreme poverty and hunger, as well as health, gender equity and many other worthy social and economic outcomes. Within the final goal, there is a final item (Target 18) as follows: In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications. This item is a reference to a growing and increasingly important area that has seen huge growth over the past decade, namely Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) for education.
The attraction of ICTs for development (ICT4D) in general, and ICTs for education (ICT4E) in particular, is clear from the growth of both public and private sector investments. And the growth of MDG-relevant ICT investments has been increasingly recognized as well.As noted by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, there is little doubt that ICTs may unlock many doors in education, and do much more than that as well. The irony, however, is that ICTs may also lead, literally, to locked doors, as school directors try to ensure the security of equipment from one day to the next. While there is clearly much promise to the use of ICTs for education, and for the MDGs more generally, there is at the same time a wellknown ignorance of the consequences or impact of ICTs on education goals and targets. The issue is not, usually, whether ICTs are good or bad, or even whether doors are more
open than locked. The real world is rarely so clearly divided. We are, more often than not, in a situation where we think there may be an opportunity for development investment, but are unsure of which of the large menu of options will have the greatest payoff for the desired results when related to the investments made. This is, simply put, a cost-benefit analysis.
But what are the costs and what are the benefits? Creating a relevant and actionable knowledge base in the field of ICT4E is an essential first step in trying to help policy makers make effective decisions. Yet, in the area of ICTs for education unlike, say, improved literacy primers there are high entry costs (as ICT use in education may require significant investments in new infrastructure), significant recurrent costs (maintenance and training), and
opportunities for knowledge distortions due to the high profile (and political) aspects of large ICT interventions. What does it take to create such a knowledge base?
Read the full report at Infodev.
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