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The Challenges of Information and Communications Technology Education in Sub-Saharan Africa

Published:29 September 2015Publication History

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the Information Technology programs at three African universities in three different countries (Rwanda, South Africa, and Kenya) along with an examination of the IT scene in each of the countries. The challenges faced in each of these countries are similar, but each one has its own unique issues. Much of Africa seems to be hedging a bet that ICT (information and communications technology - or technologies) will be the thing that leads their countries and economies into the 21st century. Many of the major computing tech companies are in Africa staking their claim. Each country's success in becoming the next Information and Communications technology hub will come down to how well they can train and retain the next generation of ICT specialists.

Although, many consider Information Technology to be a component of ICT while others consider them to mean the same thing in terms of a broad definition. In this paper, the term ICT will be used as encompassing all areas of computing including computer science and information systems. IT will be used when referring to IT as defined in the ACM and IEEE Curriculum Guidelines.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGITE '15: Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education
      September 2015
      192 pages
      ISBN:9781450338356
      DOI:10.1145/2808006

      Copyright © 2015 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 29 September 2015

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      SIGITE '15 Paper Acceptance Rate24of58submissions,41%Overall Acceptance Rate176of429submissions,41%

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