Hong Kong-based IT company NetDragon Websoft Holdings has partnered with the Nigerian government to promote the development of digital education in Africa.
Xiong Li, CEO of NetDragon, and Ife Adebayo, special assistant on innovation and entrepreneurship to the Nigerian vice president, have signed a memorandum of cooperation for N-Power Junior Smart Classroom Cooperation and a framework agreement for Initiative of Digital Education in Africa-Nigeria (IDEA-Nigeria) Cooperation.
The signing took place at the second edition of the Digital China Summit, themed Digital Maritime Silk Road Empowering High-Quality Development, in Fuzhou.
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and yet it faces the problem of inadequate educational resources and infrastructure. The N-Power Project is aimed at enhancing the scientific knowledge and skills of children and young people in the country.
Under the agreement, NetDragon will supply 10,000 smart classrooms and will help Nigeria build a national education resources public service platform, national teaching community network platform, national digital talent training platform and a national future education experience centre.
These will help Nigeria accelerate the development of digital education and improve basic, lifelong and future education across Africa.
The smart classrooms, which will benefit 500,000 students in Nigeria, will be equipped with NetDragon’s educational products and platform resources.
In order to tackle a shortage of classrooms and uneven distribution of educational resources, the Nigerian government is considering deploying NetDragon’s new digital education project, the Pop-up Classroom, which can be set up easily in remote areas.
Xiong Li said the collaboration will become a model for digital education in Africa and is expected to be followed by similatr agreements in other countries, such as Kenya and Ghana.
“In the future, NetDragon hopes to see more African countries joining the IDEA family to jointly promote the development of digital education in Africa,” he said.
NetDragon also aims to echo the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, “to ensure an inclusive and fair-quality education and provide everyone with the opportunity of lifelong learning.”
At the Digital Maritime Silk Road Sub-forum, Ghana’s government also signed a memorandum of cooperation for digital education with NetDragon, which will provide technical support to develop future education in the country.
NetDragon was established in 1999 is a developer, operator and publisher of online games in China, and is also the first Chinese game company that successfully expanded into overseas markets.
In recent years, NetDragon has also started to scale its online education business on the back of its strategy to create the largest global online learning community and to bring the “classroom of the future” to every school around the world.
tagged in: Digital China Summit, Ife Adebayo, NetDragon, Xiong Li