By Abdi Ali
Published May 17, 2021
A higher education online platform known as Unicaf has announced plans to expand to 17 countries in Africa.
Nicos Nicolaou, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Unicaf who says his platform has students in 158 countries, says ‘sustained increase in demand for access to education across Africa is unavoidable as populations grow, and given the role of education in modernisation and development, it is critical that governments increase higher education opportunities’.
“Taking into consideration that tens of millions of additional students will become of university age in the next decade and the fact that there are no plans to build hundreds of new universities in the continent,” Dr Nicolaou says, “the only solution is online learning.”
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Saying “The skilful use of modern technologies can enhance teaching and learning effectiveness and, thus, may substantially contribute towards the goals and objectives associated with sustainable, inclusive growth and development,” Dr Nicolaou says “Distance education can eliminate current barriers to higher education in Africa, imposed by space and time, and can dramatically expand access to lifelong learning.”
Nicolaou is of the opinion that “Using flexible delivery models, students will no longer have to visit a physical location at specific times and days. A modern higher education institution, such as Unicaf University, no longer has to be at any specific physical location but, through the use of technology, can exist anywhere, anytime for students who wish to access study materials and complete a particular academic programme fully online.”
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Though there has been a high growth and adoption in education technology around the world and projections for the online education market are that digital education is expected to reach US$350 Billion by 2025, the COVID-19 is causing online learning to expand dramatically.
“Almost all universities had to shift to remote learning to serve their students. In a very short time, everyone had to shift from face-to-face teaching to online, using a variety of technologies. The pandemic provided the catalyst needed for universities to move online and to use digital platforms for teaching and learning,” says Dr Nicolaou. “What was considered to be the future has been accelerated to become the present; and my expectation is that this shift is here to stay.”
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Africa may account for about 20 per cent of the world’s youth population, but it has a dearth of quality and affordable higher education and school enrollment rates at the tertiary level stand at 8 per cent, according to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, significantly below the global average of 32 per cent.
Nicolaou says online education has the ‘potential to increase access to higher education, making it cheaper, more flexible and more accessible to a wider range of students’.
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He says that Unicaf, that he founded in 2012 and currently operates in 12 African countries, ‘provides access to quality university degree programmes and professional courses from reputable partner institutions in the UK, the USA and Africa’, and that it is ‘addressing an underserved part of the higher education market through an affordable and flexible online learning model’.
“Unicaf and Unicaf University’s strategy is to continue expanding throughout Africa by obtaining additional university licences in new countries and enriching the portfolio of programmes they are offering,” Dr Nicolaou says.“Our software development team will continue developing new state-of-the-art technologies, aiming towards enhancing the existing technologies we use in our digital platform. Such technologies help all our operations become more efficient and more scalable.”
