The world has moved long distances in using information and communication technology (ICT) to ease the complexities of life. Mobile phones are being used to process bank accounts without having to go face-to-face with bankers. While eBay has brought all the mantra of markets online, PayPal has made complex transactions an effortless click of the mouse.

Facebook has transformed social networking and peer control, while Twitter has changed political spheres, radically. Amazingly, Wikipedia has become popular; taking away the grace of the encyclopedia. Websites such as YouTube are being used to stream university lectures. Services like Skype are also being utilised to take university entrance exams and work alongside renowned professors on graduation projects from afar.

These and other seemingly narrative but real histories are being created each day, as the tech savvy generation of youth, at different edges of the planet, are working on their computers, writing application algorithms.

With the rising application of ICT, the quality of life has improved greatly; life has become complex, joyful and saddening, all at the same time. It has also become easy to export medical histories of patients to Bangalore, India, seeking advice from renowned medical professionals at lower costs. It has become complex to regulate interconnected mainframes creating global financial trading systems that exchange assets worth trillions of dollars everyday.

Though it is a joy to see hope rekindled for a poor woman in Africa now able to market her products through cell phones, it is distressing to see religious proselytising being spread electronically to recruit terrorists. That is the world of technology, though - a world full of paradoxes and conflicts, abstractions and amazing realities, imaginations and trials, fortunate successes and irreversible crises.

Even if the world is glossing over the benefits of ICT and learning from its failures, Africa has remained a snail-paced isolated land of techno-barbarians. The continent's poverty has worsened as its comparative advantages fade away with each day. Its international competitiveness is being smacked down due to a lack of ICT infrastructure. Its people are suffering from poverty, disease, illiteracy, bad governance, and inelastic subsistence rain fed production systems.

In this very age of facebooking, tweeting, text messaging, and chatting, Africa is struggling with lack of bankbooks, blackboards, landlines and post offices. Many of its authoritarian governments are reluctant to speed up ICT adoption as it will put them on popular check. While most African governors are clueless of the potential of ICT, the few knowledgeable ones are scared of its political ramifications.

I see that the story is no different in Ethiopia.

A country whose ICT sector is dominated by a dysfunctional and disappointingly ill managed public monopoly, the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC), our poor nation is still conceiting about its knotty voice services. This is in an era of multidimensional telecom packages. Due to lack of competition, the monopoly is charging us unfairly and giving us less of even what it could. Plugged with mismanagement, it lacks all the operational transparency that is inherently true of telecom service providers all over the world.

What is even more ironic is the fact that it is doing so at a time when the people of our fair nation are dying from a lack of medical services and living with the darkness of illiteracy, frontiers that it would have offered a lot, even with its existing capacity. Under the banner of universal access, the monopoly is growing too big to fail. One should wonder why it matters to hangs mega sized posters in cities and deafens the public with the drivel of advertisements through traditional media, since the public does not have an alternative to turn to-other than living under the praises of ETC's managers.

Taking the ball out of the court of "Abyssinian anger," though, it is important to focus on what role ICT could play in our monotonous fight with poverty, our foremost enemy (as the Revolutionary Democrats love to say all the time). With its multiplier effects for poverty reduction, the education sector is of paramount importance for any foresighted investment and intervention.

The urgency of employing ICT to fix things before they get more chaotic. doubles up when the quality problems of our education sector are added in.

True, it may seem mind-boggling to think of how to do it with all the infrastructure, management, technology, human resources and capital constraints that our poor nation is living through. Nonetheless, the priority is to identify the roles that ICT could play to scale up the quality of our disintegrating education system and to strike a good balance between things.

The Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP), the incumbent's medium term national development plan, which is in its last year of implementation, recognises that there are strains on the quality of education at different levels. In response, the Education Sector Development Strategy Phase III, embraced in PASDEP, envisions to ensure quality education and relevance.

In parallel, after recognising that the nation has paid the price of not taking part in the earlier global economic revolutions, including the industrial and green revolutions, the ICT sector strategy of PASDEP plans to mainstream the use of ICT in all sectors of the economy, with special emphasis on the education system.

The sector's goals included in the strategy comprise the expansion of School-Net, Woreda-Net, Agri-Net, Higher Education and Research (HER) Net, Revenue-Net and Health-Net.

Two of these initiatives, School-Net and HER-Net, are tailored to improve the quality of education. Yet, a visit to any one of the high schools in the nation or the sprawling higher education institutes, including Addis Abeba University, the oldest university of the nation, would reveal that the strategic promises do not hold water. The biggest failure seems to be a lack of proper integration between systemic components.

As education quality is a multidimensional concept, efforts to attain it have to also be multidimensional yet integrated. The biggest opportunity, however, is the fact that integrated management could be done effectively and efficiently through the use of ICT.

Education quality per se comprises the context, inputs, processes and results of creating responsible, skilled and competitive human resources. It has many stakeholders including students, teachers, school administrators, unions, private investors, parents, local governments, NGOs, and what have you. Hence, ensuring quality should unarguably involve bringing all the stated stakeholders together making good compromises out of their conflicting interests. To that end, the successful application of ICT would have a tremendous role to play.

On the side of educational inputs, ICT would play key role in improving the accessibility and customisation of instructional materials.

What is being seen in our fair nation is, however, hard to comprehend. Availability of instructional materials, including textbooks, teaching aids, and lecture notes, is at the level of paucity. Classes are being conducted in the traditional way of chalk and talk. Audiovisual supplements are hardly available. Computers and Internet connections are still considered a luxury. Most of the teachers in our public education system are techno phobic.

The design of curriculum and delivery systems are caged in paper age thoughts. While school administrations are being conducted by older guys with old management styles, inline with the popular saying that experience matters, students are growing lazy as they are challenged less.

On the process side, teachers and school management capacity building efforts are well below demand. Worryingly, politics are creating a mess in our education capacity building efforts. Both the governing party and its political opponents are using teachers as instruments of political dillydallying. The planning capacity of schools, even higher education institutes, is limited. Collaboration between schools, universities and academicians is very low. Furthermore, the regulatory capacity of respective government agencies is limited.

Though ICT would have offered a lot in all these areas, the many snags that hold the education sector back have prevented it from doing so.

Admittedly, and to the credit of the Revolutionary Democrats, there are some achievements and results in areas of enrolment and ensuring equity, but a lot remains to be done in terms of student behaviour and test scores.

ICT could have created test standardisation platforms, test quality checklists and templates, student counselling platforms, peer learning mechanisms and much more. Yet, the monopolistic provision of the service has dwarfed domestic innovations that might have contributed to doing so. As a result, we are witnessing dozens of students misbehaving, crime, addiction and poor test performances.

The contextual aspects of the matter are even more worrisome.

Though the Revolutionary Democrats are reorienting their development agenda towards science and technology, there seems to be a lack of committed, capable, and persuasive political leadership to uplift the cause. Regulation and service provision have been dissociated, and a lack of competition in the telecom sector has made the service providing monopoly a rather passive player in helping change that all.

With all the extensive problems in the service provision of telecommunications, the management of the ETC has continued to turn a deaf ear to customer complaints. Product diversification, quality, and service expansion are disgraceful, to say the least. Even if there is huge private investment potential in the sector, the progressive liberalisation approach of the Revolutionary Democrats has made investors shy away. Things being done in the name of universal access are limiting even the limited access. Thus, the policy context of using ICT for educational quality is not conducive to bring stakeholders together to solve the sectoral problems accordingly.

No matter how hard we try to ensure education quality using traditional instruments, it will not succeed since the context has changed in many ways. Conciliation of conflicting stakeholder interests, easy accessibility of inputs, and proper employment of processes can only be achieved through the optimised use of ICT.

To materialise that, a competitive atmosphere has to be created in the sector after fully or partially privatising the giant monopoly. Committed and capable leadership has to also be instituted. Failure, I am afraid, might lead us to miss two other global revolutions, the ICT revolution and educational transformation.

Who would like to be inked in history books as a loser, anyway?

Getachew T.Alemu