Rethinking Access.

The Intersection between Access, Education, and Technology.

Many social interventions designed, currently and in the past, to serve certain focus groups, have sadly ended up not serving its purpose, simply because of the lack of ACCESS.

ACCESS is the means or opportunity to approach or enter a place.

It is one thing to create a place, space, opportunity or solution. But, then it is another thing to have the means or capability to successfully utilise, take advantage or explore this place, space, opportunity or solution.

One of the good things, this pandemic situation we’ve found ourselves in has caused, is forcing us to rethink what access truly means.

How do we ensure that all people, regardless of gender, race, economic status have equal access to important human rights and resources moving forward?

These are the questions we need to be finding answers to as we begin to build a #PostCovid19 world.

Education is the key to redefining Access.

Education is an economic equaliser because when a person has education they are empowered to have ACCESS to knowledge, important human rights, resources and information that will eventually help keep them out of abject poverty and economic vulnerabilities. We need to find a way to ensure that everyone has a form of basic education. Formal or informal means needs to be created to scale education and ensures that it reaches everyone.

According to Wikipedia, The Universal Access to Education is the ability of all people to have equal opportunity in education, regardless of their social class, gender, ethnicity background or physical and mental disabilities.

But then, we also are faced with another problem.

How do we scale ACCESS to Education itself?

Schooling does not always lead to learning. Worldwide, there are more non-learners in school than out of school—UNESCO.

Increasing access to basic education generally requires educational institutions to remove barriers that prevent persons from equitable participation in any educational experience.

Certain factors such as race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, perceived intellectual ability, past academic performance, special-education status, English-language ability, and family income or educational-attainment levels—often contribute to certain persons having less “access” to educational opportunities than others.

Therefore, in order to increase access to education, we need to address all of these barriers, providing solutions that are inclusive, sustainable and scalable.

Technology is a solution that can help scale education and consequently, access.

The access to technology, including high-speed internet connections and adequate hardware (computers, laptops, tablets) and software (particularly learning applications), poses yet another challenge.

There is urgent need for all people, especially young people to have equitable access to the same digital technology privileges and online learning opportunities regardless of their country of origin and residence, family’s income level or ability to pay for these technologies. This is where the private sector and entrepreneurs need to play a key role. Governments need to provide the infrastructure and enabling business environment that supports the thriving of technology startups to provide the necessary solutions that will help scale access to technology.

Technology education is important to drive the use and access to technology, which has already been established as an important enabler of learning, and an effective driver of access.

We need to provide more opportunities for people, especially young people to learn, not just how to use technology, but to create technology. Teachers, Content Creators and Entrepreneurs need to learn how to use technology to create educational content while Technical Talents are needed to help build the technology that will be used to scale these contents to reach more people.

Our generation has been saddled with the responsibility to close all opportunity gaps — which the pandemic has helped to reveal — that are still existing in the world. Hence, rethinking what access is, and how we can scale access is definitely game changer in building a better future for everyone.