The Government of Egypt recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with 12 companies in the Oracle Consortium to provide ICT hardware, software, digital content and teacher development to secondary schools.
Egypt is the fifth country in Africa to commit to the new partnership for African development's (Nepad) e-Schools demonstration project, and joins Ghana in committing to the project under the auspices of the Oracle Consortium. The agreement forms part of the Nepad e-Schools demonstration project, a Nepad e-Africa Commission initiative. The project aims to establish six Nepad e-Schools in each participating country and monitor and evaluate their effectiveness in order to inform the broader rollout of the Nepad e-Schools Initiative across Africa.
Implementation by the Oracle Consortium the project will begin at three schools in March 2006. The consortium is led by Oracle, the world's largest enterprise software company, and consists of Mustek, Sentech, Ses Astra, Multichoice Africa, Intel, CompuTainer, Learnthings, Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, DHL, Xerox and Cambridge-Hitachi. The aim of the Nepad e-Schools Initiative is to provide ICT equipment, skills and knowledge to primary and secondary school students that will enable them to function in a knowledge economy; to improve health education; to enable teachers to use ICT as tools to enhance teaching and learning; and to provide school managers with ICT skills so as to facilitate efficient management and administration in the schools.
