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PRE.ACE 

Over the last 10 years, NESIS has been involved in capacity-building programmes in Africa through

training workshops, developing technical manuals and sharing experiences. At the annual NESIS

meeting, held in March 2001, presentation emerged as a priority area among countries engaged

in  capacity  building.  In  response  to  their  concerns,  a  Technical  Working  Group  (TWG)  was

appointed  to  develop  a  proposal  for  increased  training  opportunities  on  the  presentation  of

statistical data. A technical team at the NESIS Regional Centre in Harare is now developing training

material on how to organise, analyse and present statistical data, and on how to communicate this

information among countries.

The  following  year,  a  workshop  on  Statistics,  Publications,  and  Information  Systems,  held  in

Nairobi in .ebruary, focused on producing information products and services for consumers and

users of statistics. The NESIS Regional Centre in Harare, under the sponsorship of the Working

Group  on  Education  Statistics  of  the  Association  for  the  Development  of  Education  in  Africa

(ADEA), organised the workshop.

During  the  Nairobi  workshop,  two  sessions  on  Cyberspace  Communication  and  Website

Development  focused  on  using  modern  communication  tools  to  enhance  interaction  among

countries,  working  groups  and  the  NESIS  branches.  During  the  Website  Development  session,

participants  were  introduced  to  website  communication  and  participated  in  an  interactive  lab

session. The session covered the following topics:

a

Introduction to Microsoft .rontPage 2000   a guided tutorial on the use of .rontPage

2000  in  which  participants  learnt  the  use  of  various  menus  and  functions  of  the

programme.

a

Using .rontPage to create a simple website   participants managed to experiment

with the knowledge gained in the first session by creating sample test pages.

The ultimate goal is for countries to be able to link the databases and statistical evaluation reports

being generated from their ministries of education to individual websites, and to network these

websites through the Internet, making information available to all. NESIS will make available a

series of tutorials on its website: http://www.unesco.org/nesis or http://nesis.easynet.fr.

It is against this background that NESIS developed a manual on Website Development and Hosting

as  a  reference  guide  for  future  capacity-building  workshops.  Additional  material  coming  from

feedback from workshop participants and resource persons will be incorporated in it. In addition,

NESIS has produced a manual on Communicating in Cyberspace.

Copyright  NESIS 2002

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