The 6th e-Learning Africa conference has kicked off in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The conference has attracted 1,741 participants from 90 countries around the world. This is drop compared to 1778 participants in last year’s event held in Lusaka, Zambia. This year’s conference focuses on youth, skills and employability.

Mohammed Gharib Bilal, vice president of the united republic of Tanzania says that youth make up 37 percent of the working age and 60 per cent of the unemployed in Tanzania. “Employment opportunities for the youth have not kept pace with the increase of youthful labour force because economic activities have not expanded fast enough to generate sufficient jobs.  In addition, most youth lack skills, knowledge and experience required in the labour market. Under these circumstances, the youth require relevant knowledge and skills to make them viable and competitive in the labour market and become employable and professionally productive,” says Bilal.
Speaking at the opening session, Michael Trucano, Senior ICT and Education Policy Specialist at the World Bank said that with 5 billion cell phone users in the world, more people now had access to cell phones than clean toilets – showing that the cell phone has the potential to make a large impact especially when used in learning. To Trucan, ICT has been transformational in education everywhere else but the classrooms. For example, children in China are using mobile phones to do and submit homework; 5 of the top 10 selling novels in Japan in 2007 were published on mobile phones; Uruguay has achieved provision a laptop to every student; and Thailand has provided labs equipped with technicians, to be used for teaching any subject.
e-Learning has been propelled by user generated content, largely impacted by social media networks. Wikipedia has15 million users and about 24 million pages of user generated content.
There are 2.2 billion Internet users, with 110 Million of them been in Africa. In 2010 alone, 661 million social network users in the world sent out 25 billion tweets on Twitter.
“Social media provided a power impact as a tool for providing awareness,” says Lieutenant General Karlheinz Viereck, Deputy Chief of Staff, Joint Force Training NATO.
Emmanuel Feruzi, managing director Tri Labs limited and a lecturer, uses social media tools to answer student questions. Feruzi has been training school drop outs in the use of open source ICT technologies. After training, the youth are equipped with a laptop and data modem.
Nigeria Examination Board is currently using 10,000 n-computing “servers” for use in provision of examination. Security is also growing into a key consideration as cloud computing takes center stage as the preferred technology for provision of e-Learning services.