Africa Based Capacity Development

The ABCD grows out of the work that each of the principals has led in Africa. The Early Childhood Development Virtual University (www.ecdvu.org) has been particularly useful as it has had 6 delivery experiences in Africa and 2 in the Middle East since 2001. It has been very positively evaluated twice by the World Bank (2005, 2011). The evaluations concluded that the initiatives exceeded objectives at a much lower cost than other graduate-level options. The Africa Based Capacity Development (ABCD) Team is led by the UNESCO Tri-Chairs in ECD: Professor Hasina Ebrahim from the University of South Africa, Professor Oumar Barry from Cheikh Anta Diop University (Senegal), and Professor Alan Pence from the University of Victoria (Canada). They are joined in this team by Dr. Patrick Makokoro, a millennial generation scholar based at the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria (Canada) who works as the Programs Director for the ABCD Team. An initial draft proposal for the ABCD project was presented by the UNESCO Chairs for ECD at a Workshop organized by the Inter-Country Quality Node (ICQN) of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA). The ABCD is currently engaged in discussions regarding further development.