Emergent News

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To strengthen education systems in the face of the Covid pandemic, the education ministers of 10 West and Central African countries (Benin, Togo, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Niger, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Cameroon and Chad) gathered this Thursday to launch Imaginécole, a new collaborative online learning platform. A system piloted in particular by France.

Imaginécole was launched at the end of last year in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The system aims to provide 6.6 million pupils aged 6 to 18 and their teachers with quality educational resources.

This Thursday, during a virtual meeting with the French-speaking Ministers of Education, the French Minister of Education Jean Michel Blanquer presented this new online learning tool: 

"Since the start of the health crisis, that is to say for a year, we have had several conferences between French-speaking ministers at the start of the crisis and even now. One of the major challenges was to develop distance education and that is how the idea of ​​having a common program that we quickly called Imaginécole was born. We set this objective together and we developed with the help of Unesco this French-speaking tool, adaptable to each country, which allows each country concerned to develop resources. So each country can also add its own resources, organize them as it sees fit and thus have a modern tool to reach students as soon as there is connectivity in all corners of the territory. Imaginécole c ' is a program which allows to have distance education when schools are closed, but which can also be useful when schools are open because it is an educational resource for both teachers and students. And it is also a tool for the production of resources, for the dissemination of resources."

The Imaginécole system is endowed with nearly one million euros.