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Below is the video of the session followed by more information about the participants.

Episode Guests

Ketcha Pertulla Ezigha is a gender and human rights activist with a background in political science. In a search to develop solutions to discrimination, unequal education access, and power distribution based on gender, Pertulla founded Leap Girl Africa. For 4 years, she has been part of grassroots, national, and high-level discussions on the protection and advancement of girls’ rights and education. She is a Mandela Washington Fellow 2020, and in 2018 she was selected as a Global Youth Ambassador by Theirworld, for which she currently serves as an advisory member.

Judith Okonkwo is a Technology Evangelist and Business Psychologist. In 2016 Judith set up Imisi 3D, a Creation Lab in Lagos bridging the digital divide by building the African ecosystem for extended reality technologies (AR/VR/MR), and connecting XR communities across the continent. The Lab provides learning opportunities and access to XR resources for creators and enthusiasts, supports engagement and adoption by the wider community, and consults and creates content for clients. Judith also set up AR/VR Africa, which holds XR creator events across the continent. She is passionate about the adaptation of immersive technologies to create African solutions, particularly low/mid cost virtual reality for education, healthcare, and storytelling. Judith is also the creator of the Oriki Coaching Model™ and a co-founder of We Will Lead Africa. She is a current member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council for Augmented and Virtual Reality.

Toks Bakare is a graduate of the Technology Innovation and Education masters at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. At Harvard, Toks founded the student organization Leading Education in African Development (LEAD). In the last year, LEAD has brought conversations on education in Africa to four conferences across the university and hosted a short series of webinars discussing the impact of COVID-19 on education in Africa. Before studying at Harvard, Toks spent more than 10 years focused on improving access to quality inclusive education through applied behaviour analysis (ABA). In 2014 she founded asktoks.com, a for-profit social enterprise that provides ABA to children with developmental disorders.  Having observed the scarcity of ABA professionals in low and middle income countries, she dedicated her time at Harvard to exploring ways to use technology in her field. She worked on increasing ABA-capable therapists and accelerating professional development in ABA for West Africa.

Episode Description

Pertulla will discuss innovative ways to improve access to quality education and learning in Africa, such as her partnership with Miya Academy (www.miya.academy ) to provide a free offline app that enables continuous learning even in times of emergencies. Also, she will be highlighting the differential barriers for women in access to education, and the work her organization Leap Girl Africa has been doing to address this. For example, Leap Girl Africa has set up an education fund for internally displaced girls and low income families, who otherwise might send their girls into forced marriages because they don’t have the resources to feed their household.

Judith will discuss her work introducing virtual reality into a public school in Lagos, Nigeria, and developing curriculum specific VR modules for Nigerian students (www.vr4schools.org ). She will provide insights from the co-creation process with school teachers that facilitated the modules development, and will share her thoughts on the future of the project. She will also discuss measures for adapting emerging technologies in resource challenged learning environments.

Toks will serve as a discussant, providing insights about educational innovation across Africa and in Global South countries.