Africa EdTech leaders spark change at Cambridge academy
In September, the first ever HP Cambridge Partnership for Education EdTech Fellows met in Cambridge to take part in a residential academy, a week of debates and research, following several months of online study and coaching. The initial study programme concludes in December 2023, when the Fellows will graduate as the first in a global alumni network of EdTech leaders.
The HP Cambridge Partnership for Education EdTech Fellowship
The HP Cambridge Partnership for Education EdTech Fellowship is a seven-month programme that aims to grow participants’ knowledge and skills to lead impactful EdTech transformations in their education systems. The Fellowship is open to senior government officials, advisors and organisation leaders whose work focuses on EdTech transformation in Sub-Saharan African countries. Cambridge, HP, specialists and the inaugural cohort of Fellows will work together to overcome common challenges to improving education through technology - from connectivity and devices to the creation of digital content and growing learners’ digital skills.
The aim of the Cambridge academy is to collaborate and explore ideas, developing skills, increasing commercial decision-making, and connecting with a growing network of global EdTech peers. The Fellows stayed at Cambridge University’s Trinity Hall for a full week of sessions supported by digital experts from the EdTech specialist NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation), OpenDevEd, and the Digital Education Futures Initiative (DEFI).
At the end of the week, the group celebrated with a formal dinner held at the University’s Hughes Hall. The event was hosted by Sir Laurie Bristow, tenth President of Hughes Hall and former British Ambassador, and gave the Fellows an opportunity to discuss their ambitions with a wider group of stakeholders, as well as a chance for HP and Cambridge to celebrate the Fellows’ hard work.
During the week, the Fellows shared their experience of these Cambridge days with us.
Discovering new opportunities in challenges
During the academy, the fellows took part in sessions during which they explored their own successes and challenges, as well as case studies from other nations. We spoke to Adetola Salau who is the former Political Aide to the Executive Governor of Lagos State on Education in Nigeria. Salau praised the academy days for exposing her to important conversations around how other people tackle challenges, that helped her take a different approach to her own. She recounts, “Sometimes you can discover fantastic opportunities hidden in problems and challenges, and it’s only after you start breaking up those parts of the problems that you can discover that the answer is actually really close.
I believe that learning from other people’s challenges is key. These can be a resource to address our own challenges as we learn to be flexible. There aren’t fixed solutions and there are multiple perspectives which I want to learn to take into my own perspective.”
Learning from others: the power of collaboration
“The in-house participation really surprised me; I had to leave my comfort zone, I had to sit back and listen to other’s people stories, which really enabled me to think out of the box and allowed me to reflect on what and how I want to do things.” said Dr Neo Mothobi, who is Chief Education Specialist, Ministry of Education in South Africa.
He attended the sessions in Cambridge along his colleagues from other 13 African countries. Mothobi continued, “the level of collaboration that we experienced by just being in the same room with colleagues and experts was amazing. When we interacted and listened to each other’s point of views and their solutions, it helped me improve and tweak the solutions that I had in mind, it really helped us to move to the next level.”
Crucial skill to grow and change the world: Adaptive Leadership
Hakeem Subair is Chief Executive Officer of 1 Million Teachers (1MT) in Nigeria. He is focused on applying AI to solve challenging global problems. Part of the programme focused on new concepts such as Adaptive Leadership which supports leaders and organizations to constantly re-adapt the ways they work to continue achieve growth.
“We learned some new concepts, from Adaptive Leadership to using a stakeholder approach for increasing buy in into the projects that we’re currently developing. The biggest takeaway for me has been the possibility to liaise with a group of leaders with whom we could share our experiences, our truths, which can be in fact vastly different from one another. From this I learnt to adapt circumstances in the classroom and to flip approaches to find what is more effective.”
Shifting mindsets and increasing flexibility
Catherine Appiah-Pinkrah is Director of General Administration at the Ministry of Education in Ghana. She previously served as the Director for Pre-Tertiary Education.
As part of the fellowship, leaders identify a specific challenge in their context and then work with one another and experts to design an effective solution. They also explore how they could test this solution, and scale it up successfully.
Appiah-Pinkrah said that “We need to focus on finding ways to make teaching and learning easy, effective and fun, but also efficient. We have some hard-to-reach areas where only technology can help, but to do so, we need to find strategies that we can use to reach our communities and I believe that learning from best practices from colleagues and using theoretical backgrounds is the way forward.
The programme has helped with this on finding ways to help the facilitator shift mindsets and to learn to be flexible. This is a critical factor in policy development, and it has become important for education providers.”
Mayank Dhingra, Senior Education Business Leader – HP, said that “Meeting with over 25 innovative EdTech leaders from Sub-Saharan Africa has been a significant milestone in our HP Cambridge Partnership for Education Fellowship program. Our fellows embarked on the residential segment of their 7-month program with the aim to collaboratively discover how to fully harness the potential of EdTech, ultimately empowering millions of students to unlock their potential. The week has been nothing short of enlightening and alchemy creating.”
The first academy took place from 4 - 8 September 2023.
Cambridge and HP have now opened applications for the next cohort of EdTech fellows, this time senior government officials from Gulf countries. Find out more on the fellowship website.
