By Nnamdi Ojiego

The 6th edition of eLearning Africa International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training, will be focusing on unlocking the potentials of young Africans, the innovative use of Open Educational Resources, OERs and training for teaching, healthcare, farming and banking professionals in Africa.

The annual conference will also feature contributions from 260 speakers from 49 countries, including representatives from global organisations such as UNEP, UNESCO/UNEVOC and the World Bank, as well as from national educational institutions across Africa.

According to the organisers, six sessions of the conference would focus exclusively on the central conference theme; “Youth, Skills & Employability. ‘Wazup?” Youth Voices on Life, Love and eLearning’ would be owned by young African people themselves. The programme is expected to provide opportunity for young people to exchange their views on becoming ‘digital’.

However, ten other youth sessions will cover very specific topics as varied as youth entrepreneurship, statistical literacy, applying performing arts to youth employability and the empowerment of young deaf people.

There will be presentations on the health, finance and farming sectors such as; ‘How the SMS saves lives in medical emergencies in Malawi’, ‘eLearning for the airwaves – developing skills for agricultural broadcasters’ and ‘ICTs in Mozambique’s banking sector’.

Teacher training will also ranked very high on this year’s agenda, with topics as varied as ‘delivering science videos by mobile phones to classrooms in Tanzania’ to ‘confronting technophobia among teachers’. Lessons learnt from Asia- Vietnam, Singapore and South Korea will be discussed.

Other important topics to be discussed at the event include; Mobile learning, Open Educational Resources, OERs, among others.

Meanwhile, it is expected that participants will be able to engage with research initiatives in order to learn from their experiences, consider critical perspectives and be better equipped to tackle future challenges.