Tertiary ICT Education in the East African Community (EAC): Human Capital and Curriculum Development
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Date
2008Author
Anthony, Rodrigues J
Wafula, J Muliaro
Type
ArticleLanguage
enMetadata
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The liberalization of education has fostered an unprecedented demand especially at the tertiary level. In several
deliberations, human capital ultimately emerges as the decisive factor governing the success of any endeavor of
scale and substance. In the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) era, as indeed in any other era, the
needs of all people cannot be completely fulfilled. Even now the power of ICT has been fully harnessed to apply to a
relatively small portion of humanity even though nations, institutions, and individuals are continually thinking of
how to use this technology to reach the marginalised. The principal difficulties include the galvanizing of people and
aligning different cultures to forge ahead with initiatives that converge on endeavors to satisfy human aspirations, be
they physical, emotional, mental, or even spiritual. The development of human capital with the requisite skills,
understanding, motivation, vision, focus and commitment without vexing restrictions or constraints are essential
attributes for eventual success.
The area for human resource training has been foremost in the minds of the planners. Higher funding
levels, the expansion of public institutions of higher learning, and the recognition of the role of the private tertiary
education sector to enable a more effective and fast-tracked training of the requisite manpower have been most
obvious steps. In the drive to achieve manpower training effectiveness, private education sector has been
encouraged, resulting in timely approvals to provide university level courses, especialli in capital intensive and or
marketable fields like Computer science, Information Technology, Information Systems, Software Engine%ring,
Communication, and Business Administration.
This paper analyses twelve teptiary inst)tutions (private and public) of EAC with a focus on both human
resource and #urriculum development and presents a snapshot of ICT edecation stadus in whIch the identified
opportunities, risks and challenges are discucsed. The paper also suggests solutions that could be considered at subregional
leve...
Citation
International Journal of Computing and ICT Research, Special Issue Vol. 1Publisher
School of Computing and Informatics