Tertiary ICT Education in the East African Community(EAC)

Abstract

The liberalization of education has fostered an unprecedented demand especially at the tertiary level. In several deliberations, human capital ultimately emerges as the decisive factor governing the success of any endeavor of scale and substance. In the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) era, as indeed in any other era, the needs of all people cannot be completely fulfilled. Even now the power of ICT has been fully harnessed to apply to a relatively small portion of humanity even though nations, institutions, and individuals are continually thinking of how to use this technology to reach the marginalised. The principal difficulties include the galvanizing of people and aligning different cultures to forge ahead with initiatives that converge on endeavors to satisfy human aspirations, be they physical, emotional, mental, or even spiritual. The development of human capital with the requisite skills, understanding, motivation, vision, focus and commitment without vexing restrictions or constraints are essential attributes for eventual success.The area for human resource training has been foremost in the minds of the planners. Higher funding levels, the expansion of public institutions of higher learning, and the recognition of the role of the private tertiary education sector to enable a more effective and fast-tracked training of the requisite manpower have been most obvious steps. In the drive to achieve manpower training effectiveness, private education sector has been encouraged, resulting in timely approvals to provide university level courses, especially in capital intensive and or marketable fields like Computer science, Information Technology, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Communication, and Business Administration.This paper analyses twelve tertiary institutions (private and public) of EAC with a focus on both human resource and curriculum development and presents a snapshot of ICT education status in which the identified opportunities, risks and challenges are discussed. The paper also suggests solutions that could be considered at sub-regional level.