eLearning for Africa:
AMREF Shares Critical Lessons
June 2, 2009.
AMREF recently showcased its innovative eSolutions to health care training at an international eLearning conference in Dakar Senegal.
Training health care workers has always been at th
e core of AMREF’s work. Over the last 50 years AMREF has trained over 500,000 health workers who have reached nearly 60 million people across Africa.
AMREF is now using modern technology to revolutionize training in Africa to help alleviate the critical need for health workers.
While there is no doubt that eLearning has made a profound impression on rapid, large-scale training, most programs are tailored for Western countries.
A key challenge to introducing eLearning in Africa has been a lack of information on costs, logistics, policies and implementation in an African context. AMREF’s Manager of eLearning Caroline Mbindyo, was pleased to share AMREF’s unique expertise with at the conference in Dakar.
“Although there is no one right way of implementing eLearning, we will share lessons learned and critical success factors identified by AMREF from implementing an eLearning Programme in Kenya and from the replication studies done in Uganda, Ethiopia and South Africa,” she says. “We have used these lessons to develop an implementation guide that can be used as a reference by countries and institutions on the continent.”
In 2005 AMREF in partnership with the Nursing Council of Kenya, the Kenyan Ministry of Health and the global consulting firm Accenture began a national eLearning program to upgrade the skills of Kenyan nurses.
At the time, more than 85% of Kenya’s 20,000 nurses were trained at the certificate level but were not registered nurses. This meant that the majority of nurses were not qualified to treat critical diseases like HIV, TB or malaria. Training nurses in classrooms across Kenya is limited – only 100 can qualify each year.
But AMREF’s eLearning program has produced more than 100 eLearning modules to register nurses. The modules are reaching nurses in the most remote areas of Kenya.
So far, twenty-five nursing schools are also taking part in the program. To date, more than 4,500 nurses have enrolled and by 2011 the eLearning program is expected to train more than 20,000 nurses.
For more information please contact;
Salima Pirani
(416) 961-6981
spirani@amrefcanada.org
Communications Manager
AMREF Canada
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