ABSTRACT
Commonwealth Africa now has more than twenty-five years' experience of distance education. Indeed, Martin Kaunda, who worked in adult education in Zambia, took the story further back with his view of the talking drum as its ancestor (Kabwasa and Kaunda 1973: 3). Even in the 1960s Botswana, Kenya, Malawi and Zambia were among the countries where governments decided to use distance education for teacher training and for secondary education. By the mid-1980s there were between 25 and 30 publicly funded distance-teaching institutions in Commonwealth Africa alone. Distance education no longer looks like a short-term expedient; instead it seems to have a permanent place in the armoury of ministries of education. We therefore need both to define that place – to ask what distance education does best – and to see what we can do to raise its effectiveness. British Commonwealth experience gives some pointers.
