User:Divyanekkanti/sandbox

Bibliography: 14-20 Journal Sources I Used

2-3 line summary of how each is useful to you for your drafting -- address both facts and concepts/frameworks/arguments that each contributes.

Article: Education in South Sudan

This journal was particularly helpful in getting the historical context of the national conflict between the Muslim north and Christian south of Sudan. The article was framed as a case study of South Sudan so it was very factual and and I wrote about the Education Coordination Committee and its priorities as well as recent reconstruction efforts from UNICEF.

This journal critically analyzed the conflict in Sudan in terms of the need for peace-building to address the mental and emotional trauma of teachers and students. I used this article to write about the relationship between civil war, religion and education.

This journal discussed the teacher training and development in South Sudan and operated on the framework of children's needs in the post-conflict environment they are in. The article was instrumental in providing insight about the role of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and challenges with teacher training.

This journal excerpt discussed the UNHCR's education challenges in South Sudan and I used this in the section about reconstruction efforts of the UNHCR and challenges in South Sudan's recovering education system.

This journal details the history of governance in South Sudan, peace treaties, and the impacts of the civil war on other intersecting areas. I used this to highlight the demographic landscape after the war.

This journal detailed about the environmental challenges like drought and famine in South Sudan and the resulting environmental education for women that has driven socio-economic change. This article also detailed the structure of the curriculum and tangible technologies women have worked on in the region.

This journal discussed nutrition education in Southern Sudan in the Ministry of Health and I used it to discuss the current nutrition centers in Sudan and the goals of the division.

Article: Educational Technology in Sub-Saharan African

This journal details about the Africa Information Society Initiative (AISI) as the framework for the ICT infrastructure in Africa. I incorporated this information as well as the expressed goals of AISI under the Introduction section.

This journal details the OER movement that Europeans brought to Sub-Saharan Africa and the main project: Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA). I added this as a new section and discussed the aims of open educational resources.

This journal discussed how TESSA intersected with institutional policy in South Sudan and I used this alternative framework to validate all the the above source^. I used this to outline the success factors and problem areas for OER integration.

This journal talked about the motivations and success assessment of ICT4D. I was able to use this to analyze sustainable ICT4D in Africa from a more research lens and examine the broader context of information and communication technologies beyond education, which informed my analysis of the ed tech sector.

The journal analyzed ICT adoption and usage and approached it from an efficiency assessment perspective. Due to this framework, I was able to utilize this source to cite statistics forecasts for ICT growth in Africa and a quote from the secretary general of the program for both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of ICT growth motivations.

This journal article analyzed the shift toward consumer oriented technologies in Sub Saharan Africa and I used this to write a subsection about mobile ICT and the reasoning behind this push.

This journal synthesized a lot of research literature about ICT4D in primary and secondary schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. I found the best use of this journal to validate the other information about ICTs that I had from the other sources as well as create a new section about the barriers to ICT use by teachers in SSA.

My Contributions

Article: Education in South Sudan

• Removed Issues section, fixed their citations, and integrated the relevant and cited information under the challenges section.
• Added in all of the history of education in South Sudan including information about the Pre-South Sudanese Civil War, the roots of the recent civil war, educational landscape, women, etc. that sets the context for education in the country that was newly formed.
• Added in a Challenges section to cover the breadth of issues in education.
• Added in a Teacher Training and Development in South Sudan section and highlighted some main challenges with teacher training in the region.
• Added a section for Environmental Education and highlighted the environmental challenges that affect women and that women are currently pursuing solutions toward.
• Added in a section for Nutrition Education.
• Added a section about reconstruction and the NGOs and worldwide initiatives that have supplemented local efforts.
• Added a picture from Wikimedia Commons that shows an outdoor classroom in South Sudan.

Article: Educational Technology in Sub-Saharan African

• Revised the section named Introduction of computer technology and added in a subsection about the Africa Information Society Initiative (AISI).
• Added in a section about Open Educational Resources in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Added a section about sustainable ICT for development in SSA and subsections about motivations, avenues for research in the educational sector, etc.
• Added a section about barriers to ICT use by teachers
• Edited One Laptop per Child section and added specific criticisms related to Sub-Saharan Africa and added a section on Alternatives to OLPC
• Added a picture from Wikimedia commons that shows OLPC in Ethiopia.

In general, both articles barely had any content, and the existing content was very cursory. I tried my best to add comprehensive, objective information - some facts, agendas, explained different players etc. With each addition, I have multiple sources for each bullet point that have been contributed to these two articles.

Revised Wikipedia Articles

History of Education in South Sudan

See Education in South Sudan

Pre-South Sudanese Civil War

Outdoor classroom in North Bahr al Ghazal, Southern Sudan in 2002 (present day South Sudan).

Roots of the Recent Civil War

The recent 2013 South Sudanese Civil War that resulted in a division of the state of Sudan dates back to Second Sudanese Civil War, which was a national conflict between the majority Muslim, Arab northern leadership administration and Christian, African South. With the limited social services destroyed, hundreds displaced, and educational facilities closed, the implications for education increased significantly. These consequences extended to relief operations, as finding individuals with an adequate level of schooling and education to be trained as health relief workers became more difficult with time. After 5 years, in 1998, a total of 900 schools emerged in rural areas owned by the Sudan People's Liberation Army in southern Sudan. These schools were facilitated by local communities and guided by relief wings in the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association (SRRA) and the Relief Association of South Sudan (RASS).

Creation of the Education Coordination Committee

There was very limited support given to schools in most areas of southern Sudan up to 1993. While some individual NGOs as well as UNICEF offered some training materials for classes, most of the external development efforts were decentralized. As a result, the Education Coordination Committee (ECC) of the Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) in southern Sudan was established to consolidate the diverse efforts not only to better education in the SPLA-held areas in southern Sudan but also to support existing education structures under the SRRA and RASS. The priorities of the ECC were centered on teacher development and are summarized below:

• Increasing the level of education received by teachers and further supplementing it with professional training. This contributed to a focus on teacher education rather than solely teacher training.
• Improving the quality of education and training. The desire to invest in this improvement stemmed from the realization that teachers who were properly trained in previous iterations were able to re-emerge and contribute even after geographic displacement and were better suited to the volatility of the region that threatened stability and consistency of education and even physical destruction.
• Bringing the attention of teachers toward important issues like health, female education, and psycho-social needs of students is significant for development post-conflict.

Impact of the Education Coordination Committee

The establishment of the above priorities directed the ECC's focus towards standardization of education and quality training for teachers. The ECC developed a modular teacher-education scheme that operated at five levels, each involving a two-to-three week course in Sudan that covered both academic and vocational topics.

In terms of content creation, the ECC's materials for distance education has been written by southern Sudanese educationists, or those who have a great deal of experience in the region. Textbooks for the trainings have also been created for these teacher-education courses and have been written in English as well as in local languages. After the creation of these books, the ECC held a workshop to introduce 60 senior educators to the course textbooks. These individuals are now coordinators who support other teachers at their schools. Additional training about how to best address psycho-social needs has increased in attention over the years and is an integral part of addressing student needs.

Although schools have been established, they have been created at the local village level, introducing the variability of volunteerism and lack of higher leadership beyond village elders and Parent Teacher Councils. To address this, the ECC has pursued avenues to garner more community accountability and support. Here are a few key ways the ECC has done this:

• Providing seeds and tools for school gardens (600 were given in 1993 and 1994) in order to produce vegetables for teachers and children. Another goal of this initiative was to increase students agricultural awareness.
• Provisioning sewing materials and cloth for women's tailoring groups that can make school clothes for teachers and students. This excess cloth is often bartered, and upon receipt to UNICEF, more cloth is attainable to schools.

Relationship between Civil War, Religion, and Education

Prior to the recent South Sudanese Civil War, South Sudan was primarily viewed as an impediment to the spread of Islam to more southern African nations. The National Congress Party (NCP), which represented a very fundamentalist Islamic policy and imposed Islam as a dogma on both Muslim and non-Muslim groups, replaced the administrators and teachers from the Ministry of Education. With the NCP in power, the objectives of the national education system shifted to Islamic values. The rejection of rapid Islamization and the shift towards a more Western and modernist educational approach contributed to a cultural dichotomy in the educational systems in North vs. South Sudan. One such example is exemplified in the decision of the Southern Sudanese Ministry of Education, Science and Technology to mandate English as the primary medium of instruction for the first three years of primary school, which has made the integration of Northern Sudanese very complex and introduced linguistic barriers.

The civil war in Sudan was fueled in part by the systemic denial of education in South Sudan. Due to the stark religious differences in Sudan, with Islam being more prevalent in the North, students in South Sudan are disproportionately equipped to take the national examination after reaching the eighth grade.

Education Landscape

The educational landscape prior to the South Sudanese Civil War can be observed in these statistics from the Ministry of General Education and Instruction:

Primary School:

• There were greater than one million eligible children who had not been enrolled in primary school.
• The primary school dropout rate hovered around 23 percent.
• Only 6 percent of all eligible 13 year-old girls completed primary school education. Along the line of pronounced gender inequalities that surfaced even in primary school education, it was noted that South Sudanese girls were twice as likely to pass away during childbirth than complete their primary school education.

Secondary School:

• Among teens who are eligible to enroll, total enrollment in secondary school is under 10 percent.
• The secondary school dropout rate was around 61 percent.

Women

According to UNESCO, as of 2017, the number of illiterate individuals older than 15 constitutes more than 70 percent of the population in South Sudan. The challenges are particularly severe for female children. According to the 2010 South Sudan Household Health Survey, the nationwide literacy rate for women remains to be 13.4 percent. According to UNICEF, fewer than one percent of girls complete primary education. One in four students is a girl and South Sudan maintains the highest female illiteracy rate in the world. It is estimated that more than one million of children eligible for primary school are not enrolled, with secondary school enrollment being even lower than 10% among those eligible.

Effects of the Civil War on Education

Due to the longevity of the Sudanese Civil War conflict, which consisted of three sub-conflicts and spanned almost 50 years, only about 30% of 1.06 million eligible students were enrolled in primary schools in South Sudan. According to the Ministry of General Education and Instruction, during the Civil War, educational and health facilities were incinerated and shut down, school teachers evacuated towns or were displaced, and the resulting lack of infrastructure contributed to a generational denial of education to children in the region.

Significance

To enroll in higher education, Sudanese students are required to take a national examination in the eighth rate, and in the North about 78% of students took the examination and even more were enrolled, as opposed to the South.

Considering the historical context of education in South Sudan is relevant because of the systemic denial of educational and economic opportunity for those fighting for independence during the war, as well as lack of viable financial options after the war to access education. With more than 1.5 million persons and 90,000 in refugee camps, improved education is needed to pave the way for greater economic opportunities and reduce South Sudan's reliance on the main industry of oil production.

Challenges

While a peace deal was signed in August 2015, South Sudan's recovering education system still faces a great deal of challenges, exacerbated by social conditions like famine and ongoing violence. Some main challenges are listed below:

• There are huge location based disparities in education.
• Schools are under-equipped to accomodate such large numbers of returning IDPs and refugees, and temporary structures like tree covers are used as classrooms.
• A great deal of teachers have not completed primary education themselves.
• Much of the curriculum taught in South Sudan has been used in Uganda, Kenya, and Khartoum government, so there is little to no organic, unified curriculum developed in the region.
• English is the primary language of instruction but as observed in the history of the region, most of the children have only been taught Arabic and thus understand very little English.
• There are very few post-secondary schools and technical institutions that teach vocational skills.

Teacher Training and Development in South Sudan

Post Civil War, education in South Sudan has largely had a focus on peace-building, from integration into early childhood programs to secondary school programs for students who are and are not formally enrolled in school. Many school teachers have requested training and support to engage topics of anger management, guidance, counseling, peace education, and life skills with children afflicted by the war.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has supported these efforts, granting permission to administrative staff including 30 teachers with equal male and female representation from 15 schools in Juba, and faculty members from the University of Juba to attend peace-building courses in the area. To meet the needs of the children they were teaching, the course programming encouraged curriculum development in a conflict-affected context.

With the disruption in education due to cycles of war and political instability, the emotional effects on students extend beyond the classroom. In an interview conducted by Dr. Jan Stewart, a researcher of psychosocial support in education for children experiencing post-conflict in northern Uganda and South Sudan, a 16-year-old female student explains,

"On my part as a student, the conflict affected me internally and also in my studies . . . the schools were not opened on the set month of February . . . our teachers . . . some got injured till now are in hospitals and others died so suddenly and sad . . . people moved to other countries so our population is very low and who will take care of this three year old nation . . . I live in fear and sadness because anytime disagreements may occur and that really makes pain and sadness."

Challenges with Teacher Training

After the conflict, many of the teachers who returned to schools faced a wide array of challenges: no pay, inadequate access to resources, overcrowded classrooms, deterioration of facilities, etc. Many of the teachers are also forced to assume the role of a caregiver to students who lost their parents in the war. Without any kind of substantive post-trauma protocol embedded in the existing curriculum, teachers are tasked with attaining support from the Ministry of Education for appropriate renumeration, student-focused leadership, and consistency among different educational policies and practices to address both student needs and mental health issues for those working in this space.

Environmental Education

Relevant Environmental Issues

There are a number of environmental issues in South Sudan, the most notable being drought, exacerbated by famine and caused by desertification and losses in crops, vegetation, and livestock. Drought has compounded into a host of other problems: failure of crops, decline in productivity, shrinking food reserves, and hunger and malnourishment. The effects of these problems have been disproportionally felt by women and children, and education has largely been viewed as a crucial element of the solution.

Environmental Education for Women

To offset these impacts, Sudanese environmental adult education engages women in the process of selecting the most nutritious foods with local fruits, vegetables, and plants as well as informing a curriculum that teaches the causes and effects of environmental degradation in Sudan. This is driven by the idea that women have the ability to leverage their indigenous ecological knowledge and experiences to drive socio-environmental change.

An example of this is the Joint Environment and Energy Programme (JEEP) in the neighboring nation of Uganda, in which women environmental adult educators assist other women in working with fuel wood conservation technologies including fuel-saving stoves, tree planting agroforestry, and the conservation of soil and water via organic farming. Similarly, in South Sudan, the Ministry of Energy partners with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to create fuel-saving stoves. Some benefits of this ecological literacy include women gaining skills in organic, marketing, and traditional farming as well as food production, thereby creating a "knowledge forest". Such classes have not only equipped with South Sudanese women with the skills necessary to increase production and thus sales of food but also encouraged them to enter leadership roles in their respective communities and civic educators who have designed their own projects.

Nutrition Education

Nutrition education in the Ministry of Health is primarily delivered via the Nutrition Division, a division that educates mothers through health agencies as well as Maternal and Child Health centers. The objective of the Nutrition Division is stated to prevent malnutrition in its clinical stage and treat it through rehabilitation and diet.

The first of these nutrition centers in Sudan was established in Omdurman, and its primary objectives were to take care of children who are in the early or moderate stages of malnutrition and engage their mothers in the process.

Recent Efforts in the Reconstruction Period

UNICEF

A number of NGOs have been instrumental in increasing the number of educational services in the region, like UNICEF's "Go to School" campaign. After the brief respite in the civil war in 2005, the number of students attending southern Sudanese schools more than quadrupled, with 34 percent female.

In response to the ECC's distribution of sewing materials for schools, in which two thirds of the cloth is usually allocated to make school clothes for students and teachers, UNICEF provided more cloth upon the validation that the clothes have been made and received by individuals in that school.

UNICEF has also supplied basic education materials that individuals are not able to purchase in South Sudan in the form of "Education Kits," which contain items such as chalk, pens, pencils, exercise books, and a football.

The UNHCR has directed efforts to creating optimal conditions for the reintegration of Sudanese refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) by constructing and expanding schools and training centers and supplementing classes with educational materials. In addition, the UNHCR has engaged in efforts to train teachers, promote female education, spread discourse about stigmatized topics like peace-building, HIV/AIDS, and gender-based violence (SGBV). Their efforts have been bolstered by 11 physical office locations in key return areas.

Recent education statistics

While the global awareness of education in South Sudan is growing slowly, the larger issue remains that there is an inequitable distribution of learning materials and minimal training for untrained instructors. In 2007, it was measured that there were only 16,000 teachers that taught an aggregate of approximately 600,000 students. Many of the classes occur under a tree, with students totaling more than 100 per class, and limited teaching materials for a majority of the untrained instructors.

Edit: Introduction of computer technology

Add the below to the existing subsection:

Africa Information Society Initiative (AISI)

A large part of the backbone of ICT4D was the action framework called the Africa Information Society Initiative (AISI). Seeking to install the ICT infrastructure in Africa, its goals were to were connect every single African village with the global information network by 2010 and spur growth of smaller ICT initiatives in different sectors. A decade after its enactment, there are still hundreds of villages without electricity and connectivity between disparate ICTs is lacking.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

According to UNESCO in 2002, open educational resources (OERs) are open provisions of educational resources that are enabled by ICTs for use and adaptation by users for non-commercial users. In the context of teacher education in Sub-Saharan Africa, the most notable OER project is is TESSA, Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, which constitutes 13 African institutions and five international organizations working to equip teachers with practical activities for classrooms and language specific modules.

There are three different modes of use for OERs across the 200,000 teachers in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia: very structured modules, loosely structured modules, and guided modules.

Specifically in Nigeria and Sudan, large-scale distance education is primarily used for teacher education and thus highly structured guides with TESSA study units are given to trainee teachers, who are often in rural areas with limited Internet access.

Some criticisms of TESSA OERs cited by teachers include lack of relevance of curriculum materials and existing satisfaction with current resources.

Sustainable ICT for development in Sub-Saharan Africa

One of the most prominent paradigms for technological change and innovation in Sub-Saharan African has been the information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) initiative. Positioned as an avenue to move millions of individuals out of poverty in developing regions, few reports on experiments of such practices have demonstrated success of ICT4D on the standard of living in Africa. Regardless, ICT4D is still rendered as one of the most prominent technological interventions in the region. Every year, proposals for more sustainable ICT4D initiatives are suggested by researchers from around the world at the AFRICOMM Conference.

Motivations for Sustainable ICT

Landscape

With the advent of new technologies and communication as a means for organization and development between public and private sectors in developing countries, in addition to the growing penetration of mobile devices due to their increasing affordability, the poor in Sub-Saharan African have largely been seen as both producers and consumers of information and communication technologies.

According to a 2013 study conducted by the GSM Association, the number of mobile subscribers in Sub-Saharan Africa has increased 18 percent per year between the years 2007 and 2012. In 2012, the number of mobile subscriptions in Sub-Saharan African reached almost 650 million, greater than both that in the US and EU.

Android penetration is the highest due to easy integration of social innovation tools in areas of e-health, e-learning, waste management, mobile banking, etc., and phones are the preferred way for many to access the internet.

Initially, ICT in Sub-Saharan Africa was primarily restricted to private use, but today it has been introduced in formal and institutional spheres as a tool for development, social growth, economic expansion and population growth. A study conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGC) released in November 2015 highlights that the internet only contributes 2.9 percent to Kenya's GDP and 1.2 percent to South Africa's GDP.

Mobile ICT

There is a huge push for mobile ICT in Sub-Saharan Africa for three key reasons:

1. Nations in this region are expanding their telecommunications sectors.
2. Consumers are unsatisfied with the inadequate fixed-line ICT.
3. Wireless technology has rapidly diffused, and this is the base for mediating business transactions. This lends to the growth of a sustainable m-commerce sector.

Motivations for Growth

Beyond trying to increase GDP growth in the short-term, ICT is covered in four of the 17 different Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were selected by the UN in September 2015. Seen and described as a catalyst for education, infrastructure development, sustainable industrialization and gender equality, the motivations for ICT's spread are outlined below:

1. Catalyst for development - Initially more pertinent to leisure use cases, ICT intersects with a wide array of basic need issues in areas of education, transportation, health, energy use, nutrition, water accessibility, etc. There have been many successful catalyst companies as a result, and some notable ones include:
   1. Obami - a social and educational learning platform that started in South Africa and has been adopted by more than 30,000 educators in schools across Sub-Saharan Africa.
   2. Gifted Mom - a mobile health platform that started in Cameroon and betters the health conditions of women who are pregnant and newborn children in rural communities.
   3. M-Pesa - a mobile payment system that originally launched in Kenya and now has more than 30 million users who utilize it for loans, health provisions, purchases and international transfers.
      1. Significance: This example is particularly important to educational technology, because it was largely dependent on policy decisions from the Kenyan government to encourage competition in the sector of telecommunications and ICT-driven innovation, which broke the monopoly of state-led telecommunications and fostered competition among firms. The case of M-Pesa also highlights the importance of communal trust that enables the successful integration of ICTs into various socio-economic activities on an institutional level. Without the incorporation and on-boarding of ICT objectives on the national development agenda, coupled with agreement of local stakeholders, M-Pesa would not have been as successful as it has been. Applied to the case of educational technology, unilaterally funded ICTs may be largely unsuccessful to enact institutional change without the willingness of the local and national governments.
   4. Jumia - an online shopping marketplace that began in Nigeria and has spread to 23 different African countries.
   5. W Afate - a $100 3-D printer that is constructed from discarded electronic waste.
   6. M-Louma - a web and mobile platform that connects farmers with food buyers using real-time market price estimates, localizations and information for improving the agriculture supply chain.
2. Inclusive growth - Proponents of ICT suggest that its worthiness extends beyond a luxury for Africa and seeks to efficiently contribute to sustainable and inclusive growth for many different countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
3. Opportunity for sustainability - Currently, little has been done in the management of electrical and electronic waste (EEW). Without necessary regulations for dealing with recycling waste, there is a large market for tools in sustainability.
4. Improving education - In a study on ICT adoption and the digital divide, it was found that the usage of computers and Internet access is directly linked to education. If the growth of the Internet aligns with mobile emergence in early 2000s, then it is projected that ICT can add approximately $300 billion to Africa's GDP by the year 2025. Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure, the secretary general of ITU, explains the extent of educational tech possibilities in his remarks:

"ICTs are truly transformational. With the power of technology, we can educate every African citizen, right across the continent. With the power of technology, we can open new opportunities and create new well-paid jobs for our people. With the power of technology we can deliver healthcare services to every African citizen, even in the remotest villages. And with the power of technology we can empower African women and leverage the fantastic energy and passion of young Africans. This is not just a pipe-dream: this is real."

Criticisms

1. Vague agenda - From 2005, the UN ICT Task Force has attempted to implement a clear agenda about ICT priorities and implementation strategy, yet this has not been created. Only broad, global goals have been set, and the major players in these have largely been the government bodies administration and non-governmental organizations that have been funded by the respective UN agency.
2. Knowledge gap - In order for ICT to truly provide inclusive growth, there needs to be educational structures and resources made available to understand how to use ICT. Currently, most of the learning is very informal (through friends or family) because administrations have typically refrained from investing in the digital sphere among other initiatives.
3. Minimal return on experiences - Questions about the success of ICT initiatives remain as there is a lack of documentation on failed and successful experiences.

Avenues for ICT Research in Education in Sub-Saharan Africa

The success or failure of ICTs in Sub-Saharan Africa is highly dependent on and challenged by regional problems such as food and water shortage, pandemic diseases, wars, or heritage loss. Some areas that have been identified for more immediate ICT4D action include health management, food and water, peace, and heritage. In terms of research initiatives that pertain to educational technology, one important use case is e-Learning, where the issue of penetration results from its targets. For example, in rural areas, e-Learning serves the purpose of advertisement and even propaganda, while in urban areas the purpose is more oriented to overcoming the shortage of teaching personnel.

Barriers to ICT Use by Teachers in SSA

There are many physical and cultural factors that inhibit the complete adoption and integration of ICT practices by teachers in Sub-Saharan including and not limited to: unreliable access to electricity, limited software and hardware provisions, language limitation, country size and terrain, and population dispersion. Educational limiting factors include teachers' literacy rates, access to professional development, and missing unified national policy on computer use in schools.

One Laptop Per Child - edits

Add the picture below:

A school in Ethiopia that received laptops from the OLPC program

Criticisms of One Laptop per Child in Sub-Saharan Africa

Unlike more large scale efforts to integrate and enhance education, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program faces criticism on the premise that targeting the poorest areas in Africa that may not have the financial viability to afford laptop computers and maintenance costs for the children. Despite its objectives of distributing 100 to 150 million laptops by the year 2008 to the developing countries with the most need, it is measured that as of August 2010, more than 80 percent of the 1.5 million laptops have been sent to high or upper middle income countries according to the World Bank’s classifications.

Alternatives to One Laptop Per Child

In comparing the distribution of money of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program with other channels of education betterment, there are many low-cost programs that have more definitive impact than OPLC's distribution laptops to "low-income" countries. Some other proposed cost-benefit ratios for other aid programs seeking to improve educational and socioeconomic conditions include:

• Spending $8 per individual per year over a span of 5 years could potentially save 11 million lives.
• Spending $0.50 per student (this was implemented in Kenya), which was successful in increasing school participation by 14 percent.
• Building schools.
• Hiring additional instructors.
• Focusing on minimizing and mitigating costs of attention school and getting textbooks.

Many of these low-cost programs have sought to specifically increase the access to education fo women in hopes of increase literacy, equality in pay, economic viability, better productivity, more democratic and responsive political institutions, and better overall public health.

Summarizing and Synthesizing

For area article on education in South Sudan: New section: History of Education in Sudan South Sudan, prior to the war, was also primarily viewed as an impediment to the spread of Islam to more southern African nations. The National Congress Party (NCP), which represented a very fundamentalist Islamic policy and imposed Islam as a dogma on both Muslim and non-Muslim groups, replaced the administrators and teachers from the Ministry of Education. With the NCP in power, the objectives of the national education system shifted to Islamic values.

The civil war in Sudan was fueled in part by the systemic denial of education in South Sudan. Due to the stark religious differences in Sudan, with Islam being more prevalent in the North, students in South Sudan are disproportionately equipped to take the national examination after reaching the eighth grade.

Due to the longevity of the civil war conflict, which spanned almost 50 years, only about 30% of 1.06 million eligible students were enrolled in primary schools in South Sudan as opposed to the the North, where 78% of students took the national examination in grade 8 and even more were enrolled. (citation = Sudanese Images of the Other: Education and Conflict in Sudan)

For the sector article on educational technology in Sub-Saharan Africa: New section: Criticisms of One Laptop per Child in Sub-Saharan Africa Unlike more large scale efforts to integrate and enhance education, the One Laptop Per Child program faces criticism on the premise that targeting the poorest areas in Africa that may not have the financial viability to afford laptop computers and maintenance costs for the children. Despite its objectives of distributing 100 to 150 million laptops by the year 2008 to the developing countries with the most need, it is measured that as of August 2010, more than 80 percent of the 1.5 million laptops have been sent to high or upper middle income countries according to the World Bank’s classifications. (citation to add: CAN ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD SAVE THE WORLD'S POOR?)

New Section: Sustainability for Educational Technology Put example projects that were sustainable and how connecting global and grassroots efforts is the goal.

Bibliography

Article 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_technology_in_sub-Saharan_Africa

This article is helpful for learning about educational technology and tech sustainability because it evaluates avenues to sustainability in the midst of in country crises. The article also explores innovation politics in Africa.

This article is helpful for understanding the social impact of the one laptop per child initiative, which was the main initiatives around the region my practice is targeted on. The criticism of the attempts to provide “learner-centered learning in technology-rich environments” is useful to the Wikipedia article to evaluate historical technological development efforts.

This article details the vision of the one laptop per child efforts and critically looks at the need still left to integrate education betterment efforts and areas of growth. The article also details the demographic and infrastructure landscape of the schools in these regions that were initially targeted, so that would be good context as well.

This journal is very helpful to my Wikipedia page because it talks in depth about the recent processes for educational technology R&D from a more technical lens and methodologic trends.

Article 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Sudan

This article is helpful for the Wikipedia page on education in South Sudan because it provides the context for the governmental instability and lack of infrastructure that resulted from the wars and threatens safe schooling.

This article is very helpful for the South Sudan area page because it discusses how the civil war and education system are interlinked and how education was used to both contribute to reconciliation in the war-torn nation but also conflict. This benefits the wiki page because there is currently no information about the political context of education.

This article is very relevant to the area article because it discusses how conflict impact the mental health of not only students but the teachers and different educational frameworks for peacebuilding in the classroom.

Evaluating two articles

Area

Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Sudan
The article is pretty limiting in that it drops some statistics that are supposed to highlight "issues", but given this is a new and very war-torn country, there should be some historical context so that the pure numbers don't distract. Political context is also very important but the section on education ministries only provides links and no information -- some of these links are blank pages. For further learning for my PE, understanding the different barriers to education at different levels - primary, secondary and post secondary is important. The article seems very positively speaking about the government, in saying that the government provides housing and food to these students, but many areas of criticism about the government are missing. Underrepresented are the viewpoints of the students, who may have better anecdotes and perspectives about the barriers to education. One of the links to the Guardian is very good, the other one is from a very biased source (from a Sudanese newspaper), and two others are broken links. I could add more links to education in Sudan previously before the country split in two, because it provides useful historical context. There isn't much on the talk page other than a proposal to add a section for female education in the region and one merge issue. This article is part of WikiProject Africa. My learning in GPP is different from how Wikipedia discusses education in South Sudan because there is a lack of alternative perspectives and high focus on statistics without context.

Sector

Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_technology_in_sub-Saharan_Africa

This article gives a very broad overview of the different educational technologies in Sub Saharan Africa, but regional analysis is needed because the region is huge. In addition, there is no section on the difficulties of integrating ed tech in curriculum or in schools. I think there should also be links to pages for the education in specific countries, and the country pages too. M-learning, or mobile learning is very interesting to me for my PE as an additional lens to understand ed tech and assess sustainable distribution of it. There seems to be the majority of the focus on Kenya, and since there are so many different countries in the region, it might be helpful to make sub pages for ed tech in those specific regions and then link them on here. There is no mention of Sudan, and in the page about Sub Saharan Africa under education, there is no link to the educational technology in sub saharan Africa page. There is one clickable citation and it is a UNESCO report (Written in another language). The sources are all from UNESCO, so this is a clear lack of diversity in references. The references are for the most part up to date, but all statistics are from the same couple articles. There is nothing on the talk page, and conversations need to be held because it is such a large region. My learning in GPP is different from this article because it sources information about perspectives from a variety of different sources, while this article is very limited in that way.

Selecting Possible Articles

Area

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Sudan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Haiti
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Sudan

Sector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_South_Sudan#Microfinance_institutions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_technology_in_sub-Saharan_Africa