Ashesi student, Naa Ayeleysa Quaynor-Mettle ‘13, was invited to this year’s World Innovation Summit in Education (WISE) in Doha, Qatar, to share insights into creative methods in education and their potential to improve access to high quality learning. Naa’s presentation at WISE 2012, held from 13th to 15th November, was the culmination of an intensive year of travel and learning about on-the-ground innovations in education around the world as one of WISE’s Learner’s Voice students.
The three-day education summit, held under the theme ‘collaborating for change’, brought together more than 1,000 education officials, aid agency heads, business leaders and social activists from over 100 countries. Conversations at the summit focused on exploring how collaboration in many forms and at many levels can become the driving force of efforts to inspire innovation in education.
Speaking at the summit, Naa argued that present-day Ghana needed to prioritise teacher and curriculum quality over technology if the country was to overcome its current education challenges. She explained that Ghana, like many other sub-Saharan African countries, was not fully prepared to efficiently utilize technology to provide quality education delivery. Naa concluded that Ghana should focus on building a more universal and diverse curriculum, better train its teachers and improve teaching conditions, and build infrastructure capacity for educational technology for the long term.
“Being a part of the WISE program as a learner, mentor, and speaker has been an exciting, humbling, and amazing learning experience,” Naa says. “I have been inspired and motivated to become a greater change maker in education, and I am committed to starting with the local community in Berekuso, where Ashesi is located.”
Last year, Naa was the only student from Ghana to attend the Doha summit. She was selected after the summit to represent WISE Learners at the 7th E-Learning Africa Conference in Benin this year. At the conference, Naa learned about the challenges facing African educationists in the use of ICT as a tool to improve access to, and quality of, education. In addition, Naa led a team that coordinated with all the 2011 WISE Learners to develop on a research paper framework that captured the barriers to education access.