Open University of West Africa
Ghana · Africa
About
Open University of West Africa (OUWA) was founded in Ghana in November 2011 by John Roberts and Patrick Steele. With the goal to break the poverty cycle in West Africa through online education, John Roberts and his co-founder were inspired by a simple but contradictory observation: at the moment, higher education penetration in Africa was very low, many of the best universities around the world were beginning to put their courses online through platforms like Coursera, edX, Udacity etc. The two founders became driven by the idea of harnessing this “perfect storm” of free Open Educational Resources (OER), cheaper access to mobile technology, and the profound need to spur development through higher-ed in West African countries.
Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.