Challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic shook up the world’s education systems. During the lockdown, it was difficult for countries to maintain pedagogical continuity and ensure the quality of teaching-learning. Countries’ education systems faced numerous challenges such as the lack of qualified teachers and lack of knowledge in digital education, as well as the unavailability of high-quality locally developed digital resources, which hinders students’ capacity to learn. It was a major struggle for UNESCO, Member States, and their partners to provide access to quality digital educational resources, strengthen education system resilience, and ensure pedagogical continuity emergencies and crises such as COVID-19.

Toward a Solution

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in partnership with the International Organization of French-speaking countries, CONFEMEN, and the French Government, with funding from the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), launched the Imaginecole project in 2021. A regional platform for French-speaking West and Central African countries, Imaginecole has been implemented since September 2020 in 10 countries of West and Central Africa – Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo – followed in 2021 by Mauritania.

Imaginecole adopts a system-strengthening and cooperative approach to quality hybrid teaching and learning. The initiative allows students to learn wherever they want with a phone, a tablet or a computer, and provides a flexible approach to teaching and learning. This tool gives teachers the opportunity to create courses using digital tools and to share them with their students and other teachers. Imaginecole thus contributes directly to Sustainable Development Goal 4: Ensure equal access to quality education for all and promote lifelong learning opportunities.

Successful implementation of the initiative depended heavily on collaboration with and among national ministries of education and engagement with the policymakers responsible. This collaboration increased ownership of the work, raised awareness of local challenges, contributed to the programme’s sustainability, and was a practical way to build government capacity in participating countries.

As part of the work in West and Central Africa, UNESCO established and trained multidisciplinary national teams from different government entities, associations and national education stakeholders. By strengthening national capacities, UNESCO and its partners managed to create an enabling environment for national and inter-regional cooperation, while ensuring that the process was directly led by national ministries of education. Ownership and national contextualization are key criteria in the ongoing process of digitalization of the national curriculum.

The initiative has managed to leverage additional funding while strengthening integration of the regional Imaginecole platform into the national digital education ecosystems. As an example, the platform is now fully integrated into the Senegal education portal and is being regularly consulted by primary and secondary school teachers and in Niger the platform has been integrated into the design of the Niger Education Portal (under development).

At the same time, innovative activities, such as the “Imaginecole Creathon,” managed to create momentum around the platform, strengthen capacity of teachers and content-developers, and create an enabling environment for South-South cooperation among teachers on distance and hybrid teaching and on digital content development.

A first webinar to share knowledge and innovations in the implementation of the subregional learning platform (a collaboration between the Kix Africa 21 Programme and UNESCO’s Imaginecole project) between countries for their mutual benefit was organized to address transnational development challenges that are difficult to overcome alone.

The results of the project include: 102 trainers of trainers trained; 5,776 teachers trained to use the platform; 1,376,519 students reached by the initiative; 250 winners of the pedagogical scenario contest; 45,000 educational booklets distributed in three countries (Niger, Chad and Mali) with internet dead zones.