The closure of schools across the world as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic has currently denied as many as 250 million children in Africa access to primary and secondary schools.
This, analysts have expressed concerns will lead or create a lost generation of learners, causing many children to leave school prematurely. Seeing the challenge, Avaya, a communications and collaboration solutions provider has decided to help stem this loss across the continent by enabling students to stay on track with their studies using the Avaya Spaces, an all-in-one video collaboration app for the digital workplace.
The Avaya Spaces changes the way works gets done. It helps bring together distributed groups of people instantly with immersive workspaces where they can message, meet, share content and manage tasks from a browser or mobile device, and provides an easy, secure and effective way to collaborate in the cloud.
Earlier this year, Avaya Spaces was offered for free to educational institutions worldwide, giving them all the meetings and team collaboration features they needed to keep students learning and curriculums on track.
With Avaya Spaces, African schools such as Icon International School in Ghana, Charter College in South Africa, and Waldorf Woodlands in Kenya, have kept students safely engaged in their education by using the app to create virtual classrooms that can be accessed securely from anywhere on any device.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has forced educators across Africa and around the world to adopt in order to avoid losing educational progress made throughout the first half of the academic year,” said Nidal Abou-Ltaif, President, Avaya International. “With our Avaya Spaces offer, we have helped teachers and students continue to focus on education, and we’re proud to have played a small part in seeing off worries of a lost generation of learners,” said Adrian Ho, Practise Leader, Enterprise Advanced Digital Services.
Icon International School, a leading Ghanaian institution that caters to learners from multiple grade levels, is one such school that has turned to technology to ensure the continued delivery of education for its students. Initially getting by with various freemium consumer apps, the school eventually put in place a comprehensive remote learning program for students using Avaya Spaces. The cloud-based video and collaboration app enables Icon to seamlessly deliver a Montessori-style education across geographies.
“With Avaya Spaces, teachers are able to attend to the individual needs of every learner,” said Elizabeth Owusu-Bennoah, Proprietress, Icon International School. “We have found the task management features particularly effective, as they enable us to plan, type out assignments, and follow up on them all within the same app. Previously, there was a lot of copying and pasting between various different apps, but now everything is held within an easy-to-access online space. With Avaya Spaces, we are able to create a rich and academically stimulating environment that students can access from the safety and comfort of their own homes.”