Image courtesy of Alliance of Biodiversity International, Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
One of the biggest challenges affecting the quality of education in many African universities is lack of adequate and relevant teaching and learning resources. Students rely on lecture notes from lecturers who use transmission delivery methods. Such passive teaching methods are not engaging and do not encourage the kind of deep learning that promotes critical thinking. To use resourced based learning approaches that are more engaging requires both lecturers and students to have access to a wide range of resources. The prices of proprietary textbooks are generally beyond the reach of many students and institutions, in addition to often being developed for developed world contexts that are not always relevant to African students. Integrating Open Education Resources (OER) in resource-constrained environments is a good and affordable way of improving the quality of educational provision.
The value of OER in improving the quality of teaching and learning cannot be overemphasised, particularly in African environments. To mainstream OER, institutions should not only consume but also create, adapt, and share OER. This shift enables African educators both to use OER created elsewhere and have ready access to resources they create or adapt, which could be more suitable for their contexts. This trend is gradually gaining traction in Africa where several organisations, including UNESCO and OER Africa, have encouraged the creation of OER by African academics. Over the past two decades, numerous initiatives have started across the continent focusing on making education more accessible and relevant. Notable examples of OER creation in Africa include the following initiatives:
OER Africa’ s development of OER in higher education, teacher education, and agriculture
OER Africa developed a lot of resources which are on its website and are all openly licensed. Amongst others, they include OER courseware developed for the African context, online tutorials and continuous professional development frameworks for academics and librarians. These resources can be used by individuals or for professional development in a workshop environment. Website statistics show that although they are developed for the African context, these resources are popular internationally and downloads are on the increase. For example, resource downloads from the website show a steady increase since May 2025 (13,632), June (15,451), July (19,349), August (22,414) and September (24,632).
Digital Humanities (DH) OER Champions at SADiLaR
In 2022 the DH OER Champions initiative was led by Prof Jako Olivier, previously North West University (NWU) UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources. The purpose of the initiative is to stimulate activism and research around the use and/or creation of OER for the digital humanities (DH) at universities in South Africa. Scholars from South African universities were invited to apply to participate in the initiative which launched in March 2022 and concluded in November 2023. The opportunity was available to researchers, lecturers, and postgraduate students interested to include new online resources to their teaching or adapt their resources to their students' specific contexts. The programme provided support and funding for creating or adapting open learning content as well as researching the process. With more support, this initiative has potential to make a positive impact in the South African higher education system since it involves several universities. It would also be useful if the initiative could be reviewed to establish progress made so far.
More information about this initiative is available here: https://escalator.sadilar.org/champions/educator/#dh-oer-champions
The Federal College of Education (Technical) in Nigeria
Through support from COL, the Federal College of Education (Technical) is making efforts to strengthen teacher education in Nigeria through the use of OER. Recently the College hosted a capacity-building workshop on “Understanding OER and their Uses in Initial Teacher Education”. The workshop attracted 74 participants, including teacher education from across Nigeria. Introducing OER at initial teacher education is a strategic way of enabling teachers in Africa to embrace OER in their professional practice. To understand more about the workshop read the short article on this link: https://www.col.org/news/nigeria-advances-open-educational-resources-in-teacher-education/
Kenyatta University – OER Repository
Kenyatta University created OER modules and e-learning content across disciplines like education and science, mainly aimed at integrating OER into teacher training and online courses. The resources can be accessed here: https://ir-library.ku.ac.ke/home
OpenUCT
University of Cape Town’s OpenUCT is an open access institutional repository that holds rich OER in Health Sciences and Development Studies. https://open.uct.ac.za/home
Empowering African Teachers through Open Educational Resources (OER): Strategies for Implementation
In November 2024, educators, and education leaders from across sub-Saharan Africa had a webinar on Empowering African Teachers through Open Educational Resources (OER): Strategies for Implementation. The webinar, co-hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and five initial teacher training institutions from Botswana, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa, was attended by more than 200 participants. The event was coordinated by the Wits School of Education and marked the beginning of a collaborative research-based project to promote inclusive pre-service teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa through OER. More information about the webinar is available here.
Online (and Offline) Reading Resources for Children
A page on OER Africa website with links to a wide range of openly licensed early reading resources developed by different organisations in Africa. High quality resources on this site range from stories for developing early literacy skills for children up to resources that support teaching and learning at university level. What makes these resources uniquely valuable is that they have been developed for local contexts, some of them in local languages with community involvement. Some of the resources, like the African Storybook resources have been integrated in school curricular in countries like Kenya and South Africa. Whilst the resources are targeted at learners at the schooling level, they have relevance to teacher training offered by higher education institutions.
Rwanda's ICT in Education Policy
There is real momentum in Rwanda around OER, open access and locally relevant open textbooks. Rwanda’s ICT in Education Policy (2016) explicitly supports use and development of Open Educational Resources to fill gaps in digital learning content. The University of Rwanda also has an OER Policy to promote use and creation of OER in the university.
The above are few examples of OER creation in Africa, which show increasing integration of OER in teaching and learning on the continent. One of the biggest lessons learned from implementing the above initiatives is that there needs to be agency in a context to ignite the flame and support in the initial stages of use and development. Unless the benefits of an open education mindset are clear, the tendency to resist sharing openly and freely what an individual or institution develops remains a major constraint to embracing OER in African education systems.
Despite this positive development, there is still a long way to go in getting OER fully integrated in education in Africa. To embrace OER, African universities should develop OER policies, invest in training educators, reward OER creation through promotion criteria like they do with research, and adapt existing OER into local languages, where appropriate. At the same time, efforts by champions like OER Africa should continue to bring everyone on board and improve the quality of education provision.
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