African Union president, Alpha Oumar Konare, and Koichura Matsuura, the director general of UNESCO are expected to deliver speeches at the inaugural annual conference of the African Council for Distance Education (ACDE) to be held in Pretoria, South Africa.  

Policy makers in education representing all regions of the African continent and including ministers of education from several African countries and the secretary general of the Association of African universities meet over three days from Wednesday, August 10 at the conference, to be hosted by the University of South Africa. 

The ACDE’s previous gatherings addressed the challenge of providing quality education for all in sub-Saharan Africa, which was viewed by the Dakar Framework in the year 2000, as daunting. The shortage of teachers on the continent was one of the aspects that was highlighted and thought to be the problem behind getting quality education for all children in Africa.

Mobilisation of African leadership is this year’s theme and is viewed as a need to devise policies and strategies, to implement them and to promote the partnerships required to advance education and higher education as a requirement for African renaissance.

The ACDE objectives of the conference state that the development of higher education is not possible without a committed and mobilised African leadership. The objectives also say that it should be appreciated that the relationship between leadership and the development of higher education in general and distance education in particular, which has failed to attract much attention during various reflections on the African university, should be addressed during the forthcoming ACDE conference.

08 August 2005