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Supply and Demand for Open Educational Resources (OER) for Basic Education in Africa: Report and Recommendations

Eschborn: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) (2019), 50 pp.
"Open educational resources (OER) are an important emerging genre of teaching and learning materials with the potential for providing significant learning support on a global scale. OER have the capacity to enhance the availability of quality reading and learning materials to audiences who are not currently accessing traditional print materials. However, the particular supply and demand features of OER give rise to questions about how they could best reach some of the least-resourced target audiences. This report aims to investigate these questions, particularly as they relate to the potential use of OER for helping to meet basic education needs in low-resource environments of Africa. The report draws primarily on three types of data: a review of written sources on OER in Africa, interviews of eight OER supply organizations, and interviews of thirteen teachers, headmasters and leaders of small NGOs in four countries of Africa. This data indicates that, while there is an abundance of OER available, the demand side is much less robust for a range of reasons. Based on analysis and discussion of the data, the report makes several recommendations for enhancing OER use among the target audiences." (Abstract)