10:30 - 1:00 A.M WO-MAN EXPERT PANEL PROMOTING QUALITY OPEN EDUCATION IN AFRICA & CELEBRATING THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN ICT FOR DEVELOPMENT (ICT4D) IN AFRICA Panel Language : FRENCH (Presentations available in English and French)
PANEL FOCUS: Essential and powerful lever for sustainable development and capacity building, knowledge is not equally accessible to all. However, the Internet now offers a huge potential for tearing down the barriers to knowledge acquisition, knowledge production, and distributed collaboration, with the availability of open solution tools and progresses in information and communication technologies. Concerning educational resources, the growing movement of open education resources (OER) , promoting the sharing of OER and the localization and internationalization by community of users provides promising prospects for creating and sharing knowledge globally. This movement is particularly supportive of the ICT for development framework as it relates to promoting development in Africa brings hope in overcoming the current barriers and challenges to achieving the Millennium Goals, including that of ensuring access to quality education. Awareness of all stakeholders in the huge potential of creating and sharing educational content African REL, and the political need to facilitate the development and dissemination, is a priority. The place and role of women in this movement will be decisive. On 6 March 2008 on the occasion of the commemoration at the United Nations International Women's Day, which had a primary theme of “Investing for women and Girls”, Secretary General, 'Ban Ki-Moon pointed out that "Gender equality is not only a goal in itself, is a condition sine qua non for achieving all the other international development goals including the Millennium Development Goals". It is therefore important to encourage the participation and contribution of women and girls in the dynamics of ongoing change and to identify factors and processes that will facilitate it. The expert Panel WO-MAN will reflect on how the OER movement and ICT for development in general can empower women and will discuss their current initiatives in Africa.
MODERATORS
	Gerry Hanley, Executive Director, MERLOT (Multimedia Education Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) & Senior Director California State University -CA, USA - & MAN Council & Moustapha Diack, Director of MAN (MERLOT Africa Network) & Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana - USA Affiliations: | MERLOT | CSU | MAN| SUBR|
WO-MAN PANELISTS
Geneviève Puiségur	Geneviève Puiségur-Pouchin, President of Apréli@ (Association for the Promotion of African Open Educational Resources), director of the initiative Reli@ (Open Educational Resources for African teachers) Geneviève Puiségur- Pouchin chairs the association Apreli@ with Aïcha Bah Diallo, Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Guinea and Africa adviser of the Director General of UNESCO. She was previously a professor of mathematics and a teacher trainer in Côte d’Ivoire until 1991, then a professor of mathematics, an union leader and a responsible of The House of Teachers and life-long education’ in France. Since 2007, she directs the initiative Reli@, which held in Dakar, in October 2008, its first workshop, sponsored by the french Minister of Education, and assisted by the ADEA. This workshop helped to lay the foundations for the 1st Pan-African network of OER’s producers , and has issued a call for the production of pan-African free digital educational resources. In February 2009, he was followed by a second workshop at the FASTEF (ex ENS) in Dakar, to train the trainers in the use of TNI (Table Digital Interactive), used in Reli@ as a tool for collaborative and interactive training of teachers. The initiative is conducted in collaboration with the CVA / UNESCO (African Virtual Campus), the FASTEF and the Town Hall Sacré Coeur / Mermoz of Dakar. It was presented at the workshop BREDA / MAN / OIF AUF-held in March 2009 in Dakar, at the Salon Solutions Linux Paris on 1st April , at the Salon of the New City in Vincennes, on April the 9th and will be present at a meeting of CONFEMEN from 4 to 7 May in Dakar, then at e learning Africa 2009, May 28 and 29 in Dakar , and at the World Free Software Meeting in Nantes on July the 9th. Affiliations: | Maison des Ensignants | SNES-FSU | ADEA |
	Mireille Massouka- Interim Regional Coordinator of ERNWACA (Educational Research Network for West and Central Africa) Bamako, Mali. Mireille is the Interim Regional Coordinator of ERNWACA (Educational Research Network for West and Central Africa) Bamako, Mali. In conjunction with her services as Regional Coordinator she serves as Regional Program Manager, in charge of the ERNWACA grants program for researchers in 14 member countries including projects on the use of ICT in higher education in Africa. She is also in charge of Resource Mobilization and Partnership; supporting for the publication of findings for the 14 members countries of ERNWACA; she has extensive experiences in technical and creative writing, information, dissemination and social marketing, excellent verbal and written communication, strong interpersonal skills and initiative. Affiliations: | ERNWACA | ROCARE |
Christelle N'Cho	Christelle N'cho, Floss4edu & NGO - Women & ICT, Ivory Coast, West Africa The NGO Women & ICT aims of the realization of the millennium objectives for the development through the Information and Communication Technologies. For that, she planned since its creation in November 2006; some concretes actions and practical measures in favour of the Ivory Coast populations. The elaboration of rural development project was one of her actions. Several meetings with women's organizations of the sector revealed constraints and needs in transport and in preservation of the food crops. What tools can we set up to optimize the routing and the marketing of these cultures which are perishable foodstuffs? In the active search for long-lasting solutions by ICT, the NGO "Women and ICT" began with a technical partner Open Technologies, a company of computer services specialized in free open source software, to propose a software tool called "Food Crop Tracking". This tracking software of the food crops meets the expectations of these women's cooperatives which are henceforth able to master the whole process of subsistence crops collection and distribution on the national territory. The popularization, the appropriation and the improvement of this tool, support for the rural populations, still remains to be developed and make available in all Africa. Affiliations: | FLOSS4EDU | WIKIEDUCATOR | Women & ICT|
	Michele Dean - Open University (UK), Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) Michèle Deane is a senior lecturer at the Open University (UK) . She is currently foreign languages subject leader for a very innovative open and distance learning flexible initial teacher training programme that uses web-based resources and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a teaching tool. In 2007 she became a member of the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) research and development programme team at the Open University (UK). Her role in the team is to oversee the development of resources in French for the TESSA OER that was created by African teacher trainers, researches and teachers. Prior to joining the Open University, she had been working in the education sector as a secondary school teacher when she pioneered the use of information technology for the teaching of foreign languages in the classroom, as an advisory teacher and as a teacher trainer. Affiliations: | TESSA | COMMONWEALTH EDUCATION | OU |
Bah Diallo	Bah Diallo is Special Advisor to the Prime Minister of Guinea and Advisory/Charge de Mission to the Director General of UNESCO for Africa. Prior to these functions, she served from 1996 to 2005 as a senior leader at UNESCO. During this tenure, she was consecutively Director of Basic Education, Deputy Assistant Director General for Education, and Acting Assistant Director General for Education. In UNESCO, Bah Diallo championed the believe and core value of promoting inclusive education. She pioneered the lowering of barriers to education for the disadvantaged groups, in particular for girls in the world, especially in Africa, and in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). She facilitated the cooperation between UNESCO and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) in the field of bilingual education in Africa and between UNESCO and the World Bank in the domain of education for the disadvantaged. Mrs Bah Diallo sewed as Guinea's Minister of Education for seven years (1989 - 1996). During this tenure, she implemented a highly successfhl education reform programme, redeploying nearly one third of the country's teachers from urban to nual schools, as well as from administration to teaching, and from secondary to primary education. through her leadership, records showed a very significant increase in number girls enrolled in school during this period (from 113,000 to 233,000). She encouraged girls to study mathematics and sciences, promoted the end of gender violence (explicit and implicit gender violence). In Guinea many private as well as public schools are named after her. She has also received the distinctions of "Commandeur des Palmes Academiques Franqaises", "Officier de I'Ordre National" of C6te d'Ivoire. Mrs Bah Diallo was involved in the preparation of the World Conference on Women held in Nairobi, Kenya (1985), and in Beijing, China (1995). She attended both events as a panellist. She also played a guiding role in the launching, in 1992, of the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) and the creation, in 2005, of the Association for Strengthening Higher Education for Women in Africa (ASHEWA). She is the Vice - Chair of FAWE and of REPTA (Reseau de I'Education pour Tous en Afrique). Mrs Bah Diallo is also member of the Prize Committee of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation chaired by M. Kofi Annan. Mrs Bah Diallo holds a BSc degree in Chemistry and a post graduate degree in Biochemistry. She started her carrier as chemistry teacher and has written extensively on education in Africa. She speaks fluently three African Languages (Pular, Malinke, and Soussou) and three European ones (French, English, and Spanish). Affiliations: | FAWE | ASHEWA | REPTA |
|eLearning Africa Conference 2009|

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