In my home country, Somalia, almost 95% of the children at school don’t have access to basic digital literacy education. The reason for this is complicated in a way because there are different circumstances contributing to this reality in 2023 and the age of the digital revolution.
As the case is, there should be leadership of some sort to create an environment where policies are formulated to implement, for example, an educational system that is comparable to the rest of the world. But when this is missing, like the situation in Somalia shows, for many years the country was in anarchy caused by the long civil war that started in 1991 after the collapse of the Siad Barre regime.
In this chaotic environment, an education system was created throughout Somalia, where some groups chose education as a way to make money while others wanted to constitute some normality for the young people who found themselves without government, without education, and without direction in the aftermath of the civil war in the early 1990s.
One enduring phenomenon, however, in this kind of environment was the idea that, as long as there is some sort of education for young people, somehow that is enough and there is no need to improve things. This became entrenched in the business of the education system in Somalia, and it progressed even to higher education, where the same sentiment became normalised.
You may see many young people going to universities in the streets of big cities in Somalia like Mogadishu, Bosaso, Kismayo, etc, but many seem not to learn much because, when you see the level of language and digital literacy of these young people, it is much lower than you expect from university students. Then, you may ask yourself why this is?.
As I mentioned above, with the acceptance of lower quality education as a policy from the get go, the result is what we have now in our country, where there is no even understanding that getting computers to schools from primary to secondary is paramount to improving the education system in general of the country. This kind of indifference is the long held policy of the people who control the private education of Somalia.
The federal government of Somalia has not yet brought forward any considerable policies to change this backward and lazy, business oriented inadequate education system.
Millions or billions of dollars in donor funds go to Somalia every year, and I am sure there are provisions in these funds to provide ICT (Information Communication Technology) to schools, universities, and government institutions.But, where does this funding go?
So, in the age of AI, when in some parts of the world the situation is like that, how on earth, the massive inequality of the people in this world ever be bridged and even reduced to an acceptable level?
Siyad A. Yusuf
