Last week, the Institute of Journalism at the Technical University of Dortmund held a major e-learning conference in Malawi. The focus was on journalism education in African countries. The Technical University of Dortmund is currently developing an e-learning platform for journalism education at African universities with EU funding.
Thanks to the generous support of the German Federal Foreign Office, the conference organisers – Prof. Dr. Susanne Fengler, Professor of International Journalism at the TU Dortmund University, and Dr. Michel Leroy, project manager of the EU project CoMMPASS – were able to gather colleagues from 12 African countries at MUBAS University, the university in Malawi’s most important metropolis Blantyre.
A total of over 70 journalism researchers and students of journalism participated in the three-day conference – from both English- and French-speaking African countries. This, too, remains an exception on the African continent.
The figures speak for themselves: today, 1.4 billion people live on the African continent – by 2050, according to United Nations calculations, there will be about twice as many. Population growth also presents African countries’ education systems with challenges that are almost impossible to shoulder: According to United Nations forecasts, the number of children and young people under the age of 18 will increase by 170 million by 2030.
For African countries, this means that millions of school places and, in particular, university places will be needed within a very short period of time – because education is the key to an economic upturn on the African continent, which is still lagging behind the other world regions economically and is particularly affected by global inflation.
However, the resources for school and university education for the young generation in Africa are stagnating at best, and in some countries they are even declining, according to studies by the renowned Berlin Institute for Population and Development. Prof. Dr. Susanne Fengler:
‘Investments in the training of young journalists are of outstanding importance for African states. Especially in view of the rapid population growth, the African states, which are often politically fragile anyway, are being put to the test. Jobs and health care will become even scarcer than they already are. At the same time, freedom of the press is restricted in many African countries. Now more than ever, African countries need a critical public debate on how their societies intend to overcome the challenges ahead. This will only be possible if there are also enough professionally trained journalists and independent editorial offices. We want to make a contribution here.’
Prof. Fengler and Dr Leroy were joined by Dr Merle van Berkum, who is leading a comparative study on migration reporting in the countries of origin and destination of migration, also funded by the AA, and Johanna Mack, editorial director of the European Journalism Observatory based at the TU, on behalf of the TU and the Erich Brost Institute for International Journalism. Together, the Dortmund team gave the conference participants an intensive introduction to the structures of the CoMMPASS e-learning portal, which is currently in the test phase and will go online in 2025.
The very different framework conditions for e-learning in the various African countries were also discussed intensively during the conference: While countries such as Kenya and Nigeria are already working with digital teaching formats as ‘digital pioneers’ in Africa, teachers and students in other African countries have to contend with the exorbitant costs of internet access and recurring power outages – and sometimes simply with a lack of space for concentrated online study in cramped living conditions. Here, the African journalism trainers engaged in an intensive exchange of experiences among themselves regarding possible solutions.
Project website: https://commpass.org
This article, “TU Dortmund University organises e-learning summit in Malawi: Digital offensive with universities in Africa” was originally published by the European Journalism Observatory on 22 August 2024.