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2025 MOJA Priority Areas

28 January 2025 | David Harrington | MOJA Adult Education Africa ALE

Africa

2025 is already here and we hope you had a good start to the year. At MOJA we are excited about starting a new year.

Looking ahead, we also look back to the First Africa ALE Conference held in Cape Town, South Africa, in October 2024. This conference brought together ALE stakeholders from 16 African countries and Germany to discuss and identify priority areas for African adult education.

MOJA Conference 3

The conference yielded a rich variety of topics and interests, which were further shortlisted to 10 main topics as follows (in no particular order):

  • Advocacy for ALE
  • Agriculture
  • Climate change
  • Political economy of adult education
  • Youth
  • Vocational skills
  • Digitisation
  • Financial literacy
  • Entrepreneurship
  • ALE in prisons

Each of these topics contained many sub-topics. See the table below to understand more about this. Themes such as Indigenous Knowledge and Gender Inclusion emerged as cross-cutting themes that have a role to play in all of the other themes.

Based on the findings of the conference, and in an effort to be more focussed in 2025, the following have been designated as priority areas for MOJA in 2025:

  • Climate change
    • It’s impact on agriculture and how ALE is navigating solutions.
  • Digitisation
    • How it is being used and incorporated into ALE, including social media.
  • Entrepreneurship
    • How communities are working towards innovative solutions when it comes to areas such as vocational training, youth employment and financial literacy.
10 Priority Areas
Subthemes which elaborate on the priorities

Advocacy for ALE

  • Increasing funding, financial management and structures - institutional sustainability
  • Instructors - professionalisation, networking, training of trainers, support of trainers, serving communities, mental health needs
  • Recognition of the significance of ALE for development processes
  • Recognition of CLCs role for social transformation

Agriculture

  • Mainstay of livelihoods for many adult learners
  • Agriculture development
  • Value addition
  • Agriculture and entrepreneurship

Climate Change

  • Resilience
  • Environment
  • Mindset change
  • ‘New’ knowledge
  • ‘New’ ways of life and living
  • Just Transition

Political Economy of Adult Education

  • Political economy of ALE in Africa, decolonisation
  • Political Education, active citizenship, civic education, rights, autonomy,

Youth

  • Youth employment/unemployment
  • Communication skills
  • Empowerment
  • Skills development and employability skills

Vocational Skills

  • Life skills
  • Technical skills

Digitisation

  • Digital Literacy
  • Digital Education
  • Reduced digital gap

Financial Literacy

  • Principles, education, empowerment, better financial management.

Entrepreneurship

  • Entrepreneurship

Prisons

  • ALE in Prisons, Youth in prison

Based on the findings of the conference, and in an effort to be more focussed in 2025, the following have been designated as priority areas for MOJA in 2025:

  • Climate change
    • It’s impact on agriculture and how ALE is navigating solutions.
  • Digitalisation
    • How it is being used and incorporated into ALE, including social media.
  • Entrepreneurship
    • How communities are working towards innovative solutions when it comes to areas such as vocational training, youth employment and financial literacy.

We would like to reach out to all African ALE stakeholders and invite you to share your experiences with us for publication on MOJA. How are you confronting these challenges in your work, and what innovative solutions have you come up with?

The 2025 Journal of Adult Education (call for submissions coming soon) will focus on livelihoods and the innovative methods people are employing in a changing world, which fits well with the theme of entrepreneurship.

Apart from these themes, the different African regions also identified priority areas that are important for their region. MOJA will also be working with the countries and regions to help contribute to progress in these areas.

We look forward to your participation in 2025 as we work together to strengthen African ALE.

NOJA ALE Conference 2