Alumni Relations

The OU is responding to the urgent need to support Africa in plugging its skills gaps.

In fact, the OU first responded when Ethiopia’s new leader, Meles Zenawi, appealed for help in educating his virgin cabinet for the task of government. Twenty three ministers, including Meles himself, went on to complete MBAs with the OU.

But 17 years on, the OU has an altogether bolder vision of how it can contribute to helping the continent build capacity. The UK’s largest university is now involved in a wide range of ambitious projects across 14 African countries, working in partnership with three times that number of institutions.

And its commitment to further expansion of this involvement, in support of G8 and UN goals, is illustrated by the forthcoming launch of a special fund for Africa that will enable it to extend existing schemes and channel more expertise into initiatives that will help build the continent’s social and economic infrastructure through education.

Equipping teachers

Ethiopia’s neighbours Kenya, Sudan and Uganda are among nine African countries where the OU’s TESSA initiative – Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa - is equipping tens of thousands of teachers with the materials they need to give their students the best possible start.

It is The Open University’s 40 year track record in producing high quality distance learning materials that makes it possible for students to succeed, wherever they are, whatever their background, that has been brought to bear on a scheme that is producing teaching materials in literacy, numeracy, science, life skills, social studies and the arts.

Available in French, Arabic, Kiswahili and Isi-Xhosa as well as English, the materials are placed on a web portal from which teachers and trainers can download them, adapt them and use them free of charge.

Working in partnership with teacher training providers in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia means the materials have been customised to reflect the varying circumstances and cultures in which they’ll be used.

The potential audience is vast: more than 100,000 student teachers in Nigeria will shortly begin using the materials, with a further 20,000 joining them from Sudan. That they can do so is due to generous funding for the programme from the Allan and Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the UK Government’s Department for Education and Skills - and from the OU’s own alumni.

Opening doors

Launched in 2005, the Open Door project also links the OU with teacher trainers with a focus on responding to the acute shortage of up-to-date teaching texts within higher educational institutions.

In a region where more teachers die of AIDS than are trained each year, Open Door’s potential impact is immense. The project makes OU-published teaching texts available in electronic format under a non-commercial licence agreement so that they can be used by lecturers and their students.

The OU’s partnership with the Universities of Sierra Leone, Zambia and the Tanzanian Open University puts them, as local providers, in the driving seat to select, incorporate, and tailor teaching materials to meet their specific needs and to ensure they are culturally and contextually appropriate.

Open Door’s first phase was funded by the UK’s Department for Education and Skills. The OU has now raised a further year’s funding from the England-African Partnerships scheme that is enabling it to begin work with partners in Rwanda and Ghana.

Delivering the OU’s mission

For The Open University´s Vice-Chancellor Professor, Brenda Gourley, such schemes are an obvious fit with the OU’s mission to be ‘open to people, place, methods and ideas’.

She says: “Without more and better higher education developing countries will find it increasingly difficult to participate in, much less benefit from, the global knowledge-based economy. There are notable exceptions but currently, across most of the developing world, the potential for higher education to promote development is being realised only marginally. There is an urgent need to build capacity in these countries and all of us need to play our part.

“At The Open University we don’t imagine that this is something we can achieve with only our own resources; we seek a variety of local partnerships around the world to assist in the endeavour. In Africa such partnerships include educators and higher education institutions, donor organisations and governments to improve health, services and education through targeted programmes.”

There can be few higher education institutions better equipped for the task. Quite apart from the OU’s expertise in opening up educational opportunity to all, and in harnessing existing technologies and pioneering new ones to make that possible, the University has extensive experience in forging partnerships dedicated to educational development.

It has worked with governments and institutions around the world to assist them in adapting The Open University model to create their own open and distance learning programmes. The most recent example – the Arab Open University – presented its first graduates with their awards earlier in 2008.

And when the Iron Curtain fell, the OU was invited into Eastern Europe to help meet the challenge of preparing new generations to succeed in a radically changed world. Two partnerships, with higher education institutions in Russia and Romania remain the biggest providers of management education in their countries.

Quality and scale

It’s this approach to partnership, delivering expertise and support, rather than simply selling courses, that drives the University’s agenda in the developing world, and especially Africa, according to Danni Nti, Head of the OU’s Africa Office.

He says: “The Open University is the only British University which focuses on delivering learning inside overseas countries, employing our expertise in teaching and research to help build capacity and enhance the educational infrastructures of developing nations.

“We are blending our knowledge into existing education systems, extending those and helping our partners create new ways of widening access - which is where we have such huge experience. There is no institution that knows more about broadening access and it’s this massification, this ability to operate at scale, that is needed if we are to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.”

Adds Danni: “For the last 10 years we have also built our expertise in delivering donor funding and we are looking to do more of that, making our experience available to the region and donors to help reconstruct and reinvigorate the higher education sector.”

Developing infrastructure is vital, agrees Myles Wickstead, a former UK Ambassador to Ethiopia, head of secretariat to the Commission for Africa and now the OU’s Visiting Professor of International Relations.

“We can train individual doctors, nurses, teachers, government officials and the OU has been doing that every successfully,” he argues. “But as important is the need to build the capacity of the institutions themselves and develop the organisation of services. You can give people excellent training to work in hospitals or schools but the only way it works effectively is if people know how to run these services and manage that infrastructure.”

Because of the way the OU does its teaching – not taking people out of institutions but training them in situ - it is uniquely well-placed to help. Our ambition is that the OU becomes Africa’s partner of choice.”

Adds Myles: “The notion of partnership is vital. It’s no good expecting that off- the-shelf courses will be appropriate in a completely different context. The OU is becoming increasingly good at listening to what partners say they need and then working with them to deliver.

“This is a key time for Africa, and for the global community that has pledged to work with Africa’s peoples to narrow the huge gaps in education, social and life opportunity that exist.

For further information about how you could help fund this project, please contact the Major Gifts team on +44 (0)1908 653786.

Useful links

• OU in Africa