Supporting Educational Access and Resilience through Digitization of Curriculum

One of the main challenges faced in developing countries is that many children and youths are not in any form of education, employment or training. Unlike the developed world, these countries have young populations and are characterized by relatively high population growth rates. It is practically not feasible to accommodate the increasing number of children and youth in existing educational institutions, using the traditional methods of classroom education. There is the risk of keeping more children and youth out of education and by so doing, exposing them to all forms of social problems like alcohol and drug abuse. Unfortunately, even those learners that find themselves in school sometimes hardly realise significant educational achievements. This is mainly because many schools have crumbling infrastructure, overcrowded classrooms and poor educational outcomes.

The problem of poor educational outcomes in developing countries is exacerbated by occasional natural disasters like tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and pandemic outbreaks. As was witnessed with the Covid-19 pandemic, these disasters not only constrain the smooth-running of education systems, they also make educational provision more expensive. This further pushes more children out of school. It is clear from experience that education institutions need to build systems that provide more access at affordable cost and that are more resilient to the myriad of challenges that are posed by nature. The advent of technology provides a window of hope in this regard. Use of educational technology allows more people to participate in education, provides greater flexibility, and has immense potential to enhance the quality of education. This paper is a reflection of the contribution COL is making in supporting digitisation of the curriculum at the schooling level as a way of addressing the challenges of access, quality and resilience. The paper highlights the initiatives that were implemented, the methodology that has been used to collect data from various countries where COL supported technology enhanced learning, achievements that were made and challenges that were encountered. It also highlights emerging results of these interventions and surfaces their potential impact.