On 28 April 2020, UNESCO IITE co-organized a virtual Meeting together with UNESCO Regional Office in Nairobi and International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa (IICBA) on the first largest matching exercise in Africa with focus on one key flagship of the UNESCO Global Education Coalition for COVID-19 Response: Teachers! Mrs Stefania Giannini, UNESCO Assistant Director General for Education (ED) and Mr Firmin Matoko, UNESCO Assistant Director General for Priority Africa and External Relations (PAX) participated in the virtual meeting.
This exercise mobilized 14 key partners from all over the world including members of Global Education Coalition such as Commonwealth of Learning (COL), Huawei, Google, Facebook, Weidong, Coursera and the Hamdan Bin Mohamed Smart University. The matching exercise also brought in Chinese National Commission for UNESCO, UNESCO Category 2 Centers such as INRULED and ICHEI in China, as well as StarTimes, Curious Learning and Net Dragon for even broader joint actions for Africa.
The meeting gathered about 100 online participants from different parts of the world with different time zones. Mrs Stefania Giannini and Mr Firmin Matoko addressed the welcoming speeches with thanks to the partners and expectations of global collective actions for Africa during the pandemic and its aftermath. The participants openly and in more detail discussed contributions of the partners for teacher training on ICT and other topics including diverse and free online learning platforms, large set of teacher training courses and resources for online and mobile learning as well as for off-line and TV and Radio programmes.
The next step for the organizers will be identification of countries’ needs and planning the start of the programme delivery taking into account target groups and languages.