There is a revolution in education underway.
At a time when civilisation is moving from the factory-line to expertise, our transferral of knowledge is being transformed where digital meets educational.
Beyond just promoting computers in the schools and distance learning, the real revolution in education is the one with “computer-assisted instruction.”
A rich production of digital educational programmes is being developed to help share the benefits of this revolution.
The Sankore “Digital Education for All in Africa” programme is seeking to contribute to this and is acting to ensure that the most modern resources can prove genuinely useful in meeting the challenges of education on the African continent.
The name Sankore refers to one of the most ancient universities in the world, established in Timbuktu in Mali, a sign of the desire of Africans to integrate the most modern expertise in knowledge transfer into their culture.

Digital resources
for African instructors
means providing African instructors with the broadest Francophone interactive resource base.
It means letting instructors create their own resources and share them within educational communities.
It means deploying platforms to develop national educational resources within each country.

a willingness
to set up
Digital Classes
in Africa

the African portal
for digital
sharing
and development

a Franco-African
Digital Institute
for Schoolmaster Classes

a
Professional
Digital
University


The digital education revolution is founded on basic equipment comprising a computer, a video-projector and an Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) so instructors can access the impressive pool of digital resources being developed throughout the world and share them with their students. This equipment is no longer the privilege of rich countries today, as changes in technology now mean classes can use low-cost digital equipment. An Internet connection isn’t needed, but digital classes still require electricity. However, current technological advances in solar power and overhead projectors will soon make stand-alone equipment available. In the Sankore programme, country-by-country programmes for Digital Class equipment will be followed through as part of a Franco-African partnership.
 The Sankore portal brings together the largest Francophone interactive digital base of resources that a powerful search engine can provide. It provides instructors with the chance to form communities by country, subject and language. It provides them with resources developed in partnership with Intel, so they can adapt existing programmes or develop new ones by drawing on this base of videos, images, maps and 3D animations.
 The challenge of quickly providing training to a large number of new students to meet educational objectives for all in Africa can benefit from the mobilisation of digital education technologies and skills. With the Sankore Franco-African Institute, training takes place using an IWB and specifically-adapted programmes so schoolmasters can be trained using highly-intuitive self-instruction resources, with additional on-line instruction and evaluation on a specific platform and country-based in-class learning.
 The professional digital university offers professional training centres in Francophone Africa a database of courses in professional interactive training. These courses are provided according to the educational priorities in each country through a partnership between professional Francophone organisations and companies.

A project
designed
with Africans
for Africans

Hammamet
The summer digital university organised in Tunisia in August 2008, which brought together
18 delegations of francophone African education ministries, marked the birth of the Digital Education for All project in Africa.

At the conclusion of the University, the first IWBs were given to the African delegations

Bamako
 The meeting on digital solidarity for education and development organised in Bamako in January 2009, with the heads of state of Mali and Senegal and members of the governments of a large number of African countries, presented and confirmed the Sankore project for digital education for everyone in Africa.

President Wade, President Touré and Alain Madelin, the 3 organisers of the Bamako meeting


digital education for all,
to achieve the Millennium objectives

The Sankore digital education for everyone in Africa programme is part of the French contribution to the Franco-British partnership designed to achieve the Millennium objectives in education in Africa.

“Together we intend to construct a new partnership to provide schooling for
16 million children in Africa by 2010 and all children by 2015.”
Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown,
Franco-British summit declaration – 27 March 2008

The President of France asked Alain Madelin, a former Cabinet Minister, to implement the objectives of this declaration.

To achieve the objectives of this mission and to meet the challenges of mass education in Africa, modern digital education resources must be used.


An Inter-Ministry Delegation on African Digital Education

To this end, France created an Inter-Ministry Delegation on African Digital Education headed by Professor Albert-Claude Benhamou.
It is to develop the necessary co-operation with African administrations and all partners involved.


The programme 2010 - 2015

The Inter-Ministry Delegation, with its long-term budget, is to implement the Sankore project for providing digital classroom equipment, resource creation and sharing, professional and schoolmaster training between 2010-2015.

In the spirit of the Franco-British commitment, the Inter-Ministry delegation will seek to involve other countries in the same approach and to establish the public-private partnerships needed to achieve the objectives.

The Inter-Ministry delegation also intends, outside of the Francophone world, to stimulate the same approach in English, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic so that in 2015 the objective for universal education and full participation in Africa will be achieved simultaneously with the worldwide revolution in digital education by 2015.