Working With Africans

Africa is on the move: foreign investors and businesses alike are flocking to the most promising African markets as well as to the countries endowed with rich natural resources. But to succeed in their endeavors, they need local human resources…more precisely local qualified human resources.

For decades, structural adjustment programs have forced African governments to reduce public expenditures. Education has suffered from this constraint on African government budgets and today, locally trained and educated Africans rarely meet the standards that foreign firms and organizations expect for their staffs.

The current mismatch between the supply and the demand of qualified indigenous human resources has pushed foreign firms that are present in an African country to seek candidates abroad.

Privileged Africans who either have studied in private and/or foreign educational institutions are highly sought and often they get numerous offers to work at home or in other African countries. Candidates foreign to Africa, complement the pool of qualified human resources who are offered good jobs to work in Africa. This is often perceived as frustrating by the locally trained and educated human resources who cannot compete with them. Educated Africans from other countries and foreigners are getting the job that they should get!

The migration of well educated and trained Africans and foreigners is not a long term solution to the shortage of qualified indigenous human resources.

Therefore the need to rapidly develop and train local resources has triggered reflections, suggestions and actions.

With the ubiquitous presence of the Internet, e-learning has emerged in many African countries as the fast track to fill the knowledge and skills gap.

International agencies have seized this opportunity and they have poured much money into making e-learning as widely available as possible in many African countries.

While an outsider might rejoice at this initiative, a view from the field uncovers the real challenges ahead.

Let us examine the situation:

1. Challenge linked to the context where e-learning is transferred:

In spite of the marketing message of the numerous Internet services providers operating in African markets, the end product is still disappointing for many users. Ubiquity and broadband Internet do not mean anything if the provision of the services is slow, interrupted by breakdown and power outages. It is unfortunately the case in most countries and this on a very regular basis…

How could workers perform their learning experience when Internet is down at the moment they need it or when it takes forever to download a document that contains a picture or a diagram?

1. Challenge linked to the learners

With most of the literature in Education being Western centric, most e-learning courses have been designed on the basis of a perception of learning that is rarely seen by the designers as culturally- limited.

Recently a global leadership strategist for e-learning acknowledged her effort to cure American companies of the bad habit of exporting training courses (particularly e-learning) to other countries without regards for cultural differences.

Nevertheless for a while now, a literature awakens to the cultural differences in cognitive skills and in learning styles. Professors, teachers and trainers in educational institutions that feature a cultural diversity of learners, begin to adjust their approach to training to the cultural expectations of their students and trainees. The literature mainly focus on Asian learners but as J Sawadogo pointed it in his paper on ‘Training for the African minds’, there is a reason to believe that the American view of training and learning might need to be adjusted to make learning effective when addressing African audiences.

For example, an effective learning experience in an individualistic society is different from an effective one in a group-oriented society. African students/learners may feel very lonely in front of their e-learning course:  they may only provide an effective work when they are mentored by a real teacher/trainer and when they can learn with their peers.

Group-oriented learners rarely challenge the learning or the knowledge. Confronted to e-learning tools, they may reproduce this attitude and subsequently blindly apply concepts and know-how without verifying their effectiveness in their own working context.

As I have witnessed in numerous situations, e-learning tools do not give any explanation as to why a proposed way of doing does not work. Subsequently, learners confronted to the first challenge of implementation may just give up with their learning experience!

Subsequently, e-learning course designers do not get any feedback and do not improve their product to suit their audience’s specific cultural needs.

1. Challenge linked to the products

Today, learning is not only taking place in academic and vocational institutions but also in training centers and firms run by business people. Both academics and business professionals develop skills and competences.

While academics are encouraged to keep abreast of new findings and to adjust their learning accordingly, people running training centers and trainers working for them may prioritize business profit on costly adjustment of their learning products.

Subsequently, it may not come as a surprise that training firms that witness low profit with their e-learning products in some markets may wish to penetrate new ones.

The debates on the effectiveness of e-learning courses have raged for some time. A discussion on the professional virtual platform LinkedIn recently brought several hundred of comments from trainers on a discussion whose objective was to understand why e-learning had failed.

This may be interpreted as e-learning being at the end of the product life cycle in some Western countries and that subsequently, rather than reinventing more effective learning tools, it may be more profitable to export them to African markets.

In this context, it is important that all stakeholders be fully aware of the challenges ahead and that appropriate solutions be found to help Africans in developing appropriate skills and competences.