Introduction
Autor: Leopold Reif, Hoffmann & Reif
How much does a university cost, and how much costs the infrastructure supporting the out-put of 15 million teachers in a little bit more than 10 years?
If we look at the annual budget of a German university with about 20.000 students and an annual budget of EUR 150 Million, we can imagine what kind of financial magnitude we are looking at when talking about the Millenium Goal of providing primary education to all children and the prerequisite of about 15 million teachers to be deployed.
The proposition of advanced learning technologies is that with the help of ICTs already existing institutions will be enabled to increase the output and outreach both from a significant qualitative and a significant quantitative point of view.
If such a statement is viewed as a mere theoretical assumption, then a "reality check" will show that many developing countries have already embarked on this strategy.
In the planning process of all programmes financed by the World Bank ICT is already considered as a common determinator. In this context "ICT" is not "just a tool" as it is often called in a way to actually downplay its growing key role in development. To the contrary, ICT has been established rapidly as a horizontal layer through many development programmes of the World Bank.
In addition -; and this is even more significant - many countries have launched very ambitious ICT programmes for the educational sector which are - compared to the large scale European "Schools on the Net" initiatives in the 90ties - astonishingly ambitious and imply much more radical change to the educational systems, the stakeholders and the society as a whole than what had to be absorbed in the European countries.
In Ethiopia the Government is currently launching a large scale infrastructure programme networking 550 highschools and all 12 regional distributed universities. At the same time an eGovernment programme is on its way networking 600 local district offices and strengthening the federal local authority system.
The "Ethiopia-ICT-;Assisted Development Programme" to be launched in summer 2004 will assist these infrastructure programmes by financing supporting measures such as training of stakeholders and organisational building.
There are three relevant critical issues in the context of capacity building and development cooperation the supporting measures should address.