Our Mission

UNESCO's flagship Digital Learning Week 2025 takes place at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. This year's event, themed "AI and the future of education: Disruptions, dilemmas and directions", will bring together over 1,000 participants including 30 Ministers of Education, digital education leaders, policy-makers, researchers, and practitioners from around the globe.

OER Africa has developed a Toolkit for Developing Human Resources Policies and Supportive Institutional Environments in Higher Education, which provides a comprehensive, practical guide for higher education institutions to assess, improve, or establish effective HR policies and practices. It is positioned as an Open Education Resource (OER) and contributes to OER Africa’s broader mission to support sustainable education systems in Africa by empowering institutions to improve staff capacity, enhance organisational effectiveness, and create environments conducive to the adoption and integration of OER. It offers detailed guidance on core HR domains, including conditions of service, staff development, performance management, promotion, and codes of conduct, along with templates and openly licensed resources to facilitate policy development and implementation. It focuses particularly on helping institutions determine which HR processes and policies should be in place to support individuals within the work environment.

There is strong evidence that professional development is more effective when it is intentionally planned by higher education institutions (Özgenel et al. 2024; Solomon et al. 2023). OER Africa has developed two frameworks for continuous professional development (CPD): one for academics and one for academic and research librarians. The purpose of the frameworks is to capacitate higher education professionals to work innovatively in the modern world by making use of affordances such as open educational resources (OER), open pedagogies and digital technologies. An institution, faculty, department or individual can decide on current needs and use the framework to structure and implement a flexible professional development plan.