Digital Education and Community Outreach for Sustainable Development in Africa

While the primary and secondary effects of the COVID-19 pandemic especially have spurred a new “push” by the United Nations into the four priority development areas of governance, social protection, green economies, and digitalization to achieve (or get back on track) Agenda 2030s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), how to most broadly upscale the reach, impact, and empowerment of digitalization efforts to the widest demographics possible is both highly challenging and now represents a significant new research construct. However, very little to no formal work has been done to date on the research construct of ICT-scaling specifically. In this chapter, the authors evaluate the reach of the scant available research for upscaling digitalized ICT educational training. Two key findings are a proposed “phasing” of ICT-scaling and the use of an index to measure the reach of educational animations for the support of the SDGs. Much more work is necessary in this area. Without effective and massively upscaled ICT educational messaging able to reliably secure people’s buy-in to SDG solutions offered by international development efforts, achieving the SDGs themselves (if not simply a future for life on the planet) moves out of reach.