The Ubuntu University Project: Inspiration

The COVID-19 (CoronaVirus) pandemic has placed numerous challenges before world powers, before various governments, before various existing systems, before businesses, financial systems and institutions, in fact humanity is about re-thinking every adaptive method of leveraging. Shops and businesses, public services, corporations, financial institutions, government services are being seriously impacted and challenged by this pandemic. Educational systems, judicial systems religious and other systems are now expected to develop forward thinking strategies on how to leverage and deliver their services if at all they still want to stay on in existence. After this pandemic, the world and its existing systems will never be the same again. After this pandemic, various systems cannot emerge with the same pre-COVID-19 mentalities and attitudes anymore. In fact, the whole world should emerge from this with new strategies. The most imminent thing to do which has become the daily slogan of everyone is social distancing. How can world systems obey social distancing and still remain valid? How can businesses respect social distancing and still remain in business? In the same manner, how can governments, and their various systems, educational, judicial etc. respect social distancing and still do what they are expected to do for the good of humanity. One of such systems impacted is the Educational system. During the crisis, Western countries have easily adopted forward looking strategies to cope with and maintain their educational systems. That is why educational platforms have witnessed untold traffic coming from every corner of Europe and America. Educational Platforms such as Moodle, Edmondo etc. have witness unprecedented traffic as they are being exploited on a daily basis.

            On the other hand, African countries and systems have simply been taken aback and found wanting because their leadership had never taken the advancement of Education seriously. Comparatively, when we observe (as in the case of Cameroon where war is ravaging in the North West and South West, in the North and Extreme North and where the Adamawa and Eastern regions are plagued by lack of basic amenities such as electricity, water and lack of forward looking educational systems, all the government could do was to bring teachers to teach subjects on the lone National Television network talk less of creating even an educational channel for this purpose. This to say the least is extremely ridiculous for a country that claims to reach emergence in 2035. However, Cameroon is not alone. Countless African countries have simply stopped education because ‘social distancing’ cannot be practiced within the framework of existing infrastructure.