The .Uganda U20 national team has emerged as the winners for the 2020 Cecafa Championship after beating Tanzania 4-1 at the Black Rhino Academy in Arusha on Wednesday.
The Hippos got the goals from Richard Basangwa, Steven Sserwada, Ivan Bogere and Kenneth Semakule while the immediate former champions scored their only goal via Abdul Suleiman.
Uganda looked a dominant side all through the game and got the opener in the 12th minute from Basangwa’s strike. The Ngorongoro Heroes fought back and equalized at the half-hour mark from Suleiman’s effort before Sserwada scored the second for Uganda in the 44th minute.
The Hippos came from the half-time break more determined to bag the title and deservedly added the third goal in the 61st minute through Bogere. Semakule scored the final goal in the 72nd minute to seal Uganda’s victory against the hosts.
Both Uganda and Tanzania sailed to the final lap without losing a match, setting the stage for what was expected to be an epic final game in Arusha.
Meanwhile, Kenya were defeated in the third-place playoffs by South Sudan when they went down 2-1 at the same venue.
It was the second loss the Rising Stars registered in the tournament after Uganda had beaten them 3-1 in the first semi-final.
South Sudan went ahead in the second minute courtesy of Phillip Biajo’s goal but Stanley Okumbi’s side fought and equalized in the 10th minute when Nicholas Ochieng found the back of the net.
Nelson Elia scored five minutes prior to the half-time break to give South Sudan the lead yet again and Rising Stars’ concerted efforts in the second half were not able to help them level matters.
The result posted by Kenya was not well-received by the former Gor Mahia national treasurer Sally Bollo.
Uganda won Cecafa U-20 Afcon championship
Ethio-Electric, Mekelakeya potted in the same group of Super League new season
The 36 teams in three groups Ethiopian Super League 2021 new season schedule was announced with former top tier sides Ethio-Electric and Mekelakeya potted in the same group that is considered the death group for bringing together strong sides including Legetafo and Woldeya Ketema.
Yohannes Sahle at the helm and signing number of senior players, Mekelakeya is in a strong build up to return to the top tier this season. Of course Kifle Boltena the new Ethio-Electric boss with an impressive resume including the promotion of Air Force and Sebeta Ketema is back in to the picture joining the former champions in a one year contract. Though the promotion battle appears to be between the two giants, last season strong side Legetafo and Woldya ketema are potential rivals to rattle the group.
Former Premier League sides Ethiopia Medin and Debub Police paired in group two along with Arbaminch, Batu Ketema and Negele-Arsi. Having the upper tier experience is believed to be a plus for the two sides therefore Ethiopia Medin and Debub Police are considered the two heavy weights likely to battle for promotion.
Former top flight Jimma AbaBuna appeared the side that is capable of dominating the group. Signing number of new faces in the past six weeks, Addis Ababa, Nekemet Ketema, WolaytaSodo, Akaki Ketema and Shashemene appeared to have strong potential to mount serious challenges.
Though the actual kickoff date is not yet official, the three venues for the first round already set. Group one first round fixtures will be held at Batu stadium while group two and group three will have their games at Hawassa and Jimma stadiums respectively.
The second round fixtures will be staged at Adama, Sodo and Nekemet stadiums.
President Donald Trump and the decline of the United States
Many economic analysts strongly criticized the leadership of President Donald Trump as reckless. Richard Phillips, a New York-based international Financial Analyst is bold enough to say that for all of his bombast, under the leadership of President Donald Trump the United States has actually grown more and more to resemble a developing nation. As it happens, the onset of the pandemic tore the mask off all of the rot that had been festering just below the surface of United States politics and society. President Donald Trump, backed by his Republican Party, is the very face of this decline. To assert his claim, Richard Phillips outlined six epic failures.
According to Richard Phillips, the first reason that the United States is rapidly transforming itself into a developing nation is that its President has made one particularly well-calculated move: He has been able to harness the rapacious greed that is at the heart of Republican politics and simultaneously trample on the tepid moderation that is inherent in Democratic politics. This had already fully manifested itself prior to the extraordinary fiscal interventions related to the COVID 19 pandemic. Soon after President Trump took office in 2017, the United States already embarked on a course of fiscal profligacy.
It successfully enacted tax cuts that baked trillion-dollar deficits into the United States economy for as far as the eye can see. As a consequence, United States federal debt has become unsustainable without the Fed’s printing press, which has pushed past the limits of rational monetary policy. More and more, the United States’ fiscal and monetary accounts have come to resemble those of poorly managed developing nations. Instead of following long-accepted socio-economic practices, President Trump uses lies and illusion to create a febrile web of illicitness – part oligarchy, part plutocracy and part kleptocracy – that is characteristic of so many developing nations.
George Tyler, an economist and the author of “What Went Wrong” and “Billionaire Democracy: The Hijacking of the American Political System” stated that this has manifested itself more and more in income disparities that leave the vast majority of Americans barely able to hang on from paycheck to paycheck, while a privileged few reap the rewards of a system rigged in their favor, again a characteristic of developing nations. In fact, if the United States were a developing nation and did not play a central role in the governance of the world’s multilateral institutions, it surely would have come under scrutiny by the International Monetary Fund for pursuing policies and practices that have in the past forced intervention.
The second failure in which Richard Phillips stated is that this past summer, the United States was literally torn apart by racial strife that often resulted in rioting. The root cause of this strife was the pervasive level of systemic poverty that besets so many Americans living in inner cities. But if poverty was the cause, an out-of-control police force, facile in the use of strongarm tactics, was the spark.
George Tyler stressed that simply, the United States’ inner-city police forces often stop just short of the tactics used by police in many developing countries. Forget for a moment that African Americans are 2.8 times more likely to be killed by a policeman than an American of European lineage. The reality is that American cities are being subjected to a form of policing that cannot be found in any other developed country in the world.
And, here’s the kicker. President Trump, with broad support from his Republican party, comes down squarely on the side of police brutality. More importantly, Trump has managed to cadge together an extra-legal police force from units connected to the Department of Homeland Security, which for various reasons seems doggedly loyal to the President. Under his “law and order” mantra, the most lawless of United States Presidents mimics the actions of tinpot dictators cracking down on civil unrest in places like Azerbaijan or Cambodia.
The third failure Richard Phillips stated is a failing United States healthcare system particularly the Trump Administration’s handling of COVID 19. Suffice to say that President Trump presides over a nation reeling from the physical, emotional and economic trauma of a raging pandemic by virtue of promoting snake oil, in this case hydroxychloroquine. But aside from President Trump’s mindless antics, the coronavirus has unmasked a new reality for all Americans to see. The so-called “greatest health care system in the world” is proving to be every bit as inefficient and ineffective as health care systems in the world’s poorest countries. Despite all the vast amounts of money spent, the United States health care system leaves millions of Americans unserved or underserved.
One need only look at the substantially higher COVID 19 death rates among people of color in the United States’ largest cities. It constitutes a callous disregard for human life that aligns more closely with Kinshasa than with Berlin, Paris or even Beijing. President Trump has not only failed utterly to take the steps necessary to repair the system, which he had so stridently promised in the last Presidential election, he has use the office of the President to chip away at key elements of the existing system.
Uwe Bott, Chief Economist of The Global Research Center argued that amazingly, President Trump is in the courts trying to eliminate coverage for pre-existing conditions, a popular facet of the Affordable Care Act that he promised to protect. Again and again, while doing nothing to improve the plight of the United States’ disenfranchised, the President callously focused on tearing the system further apart. Meanwhile, as in so many developing nations, wealthy Americans are completely unfazed. They have access to some of the world’s best research hospitals.
To be continued ……..
Digital inclusion: What does equal access to education mean in the digital age?
By Zohra Yermeche, Program Director for Connect To Learn at Ericsson
The COVID-19 crisis, and the impact which it has had on learning across the world, has highlighted many of the digital disparities which exist in today’s world. At a time when many of the world’s students shifted from physical to digital, we were also faced with the hard truth that today there are still 3.6 billion people in the world who are unconnected.
For students in the connected half of the world, the story is much different. While 1.2 billion children were affected by school closures across much of the world, our recent Consumer COVID-19 report found that students were able to substitute physical learning by spending 230 percent more time on digital learning tools such as Google Class, Epic! and Seesaw Class.
This of course is a significant rise, but it is also an acceleration of a trend which we have steadily been tracking since our first Connect To Learn program exactly ten years ago.
The State of Broadband 2020 report estimates that there are twice as many people today who use the Internet compared to 2010. This rise in digital literacy, together with the imminent period of rapid digitalization of the economy, means that ensuring fair and equal access to both education and future job markets will rest on the extent of digital inclusion within our societies.
What is digital inclusion and why is it so important today?
Today, technology plays a much bigger role in the quality and scope of how we learn, such as new digital learning platforms which are estimated to reach 350 billion USD by 2025; what we learn, with a growing emphasis on programming, robotics, AI and automation; and how we can use it in the job market, with digital skillsets increasingly becoming a prerequisite of tomorrow’s workforce.
The changes which are happening today show the disparity between the developed and undeveloped world. If you are not connected, that shows you the leap which you have to make between the connectivity aspect, access to education and benefits which are derived from that.
Closing this digital divide, with those who are not connected or not considered to be digitally literate, is imperative to ensuring a fair distribution of digital opportunities across countries, locations, gender, socioeconomic status, and age.
Impact of digital inclusion on GDP and the job market
Ten years ago, geopolitical discussions largely focused on competence development for teachers, with little priority given to digital policy beyond essential connectivity requirements.
Today, the policy landscape is beginning to look very different and the emergence of the digital economy is driving this change. For example, when we look at digital inclusion in the context of the job market, it is predicted that the 5G digital economy alone will create 22.3 million jobs worldwide in the coming decade. This has repercussions on GDP too, as having a workforce that is not digitally skilled is of course not compatible with a digitized economy.
As such, we already see today how governments are prioritizing digital inclusion in their policy agendas, notably at this year’s G20 summit. There seems to be more emphasis and regulation to support digital education, and the impact that has on an awakening of the rest of the economy.
While governments first priority in digitalizing their societies is on setting up the tools, providing connectivity to enable tomorrow’s digital services, it’s also important that people know how to use them and how to use them responsibly. Digital literacy and capacity building are some key elements that governments and private enterprises should continue to work on in the next few years. These efforts must be well coordinated, scaled up and based on evidence-based policymaking, as laid out in the UN Roadmap for Digital Cooperation (page 8).
Access to education in the digital age
In 2010, we co-founded the Connect To Learn initiative with the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Millennium Promise, with a focus on delivering connectivity and ICT tools to enhance teaching and learning in unconnected, underprivileged and largely unrepresented communities.
Since our first projects in the Millennium Villages, we’ve helped to connect and increase the digital inclusion of more than 200,000 students worldwide. As the program has evolved, we have increased our efforts to close the digital divide not just in terms of connectivity, but from a content, syllabus and platform side which is fundamental.
As a technology company, we quickly discovered that we can offer so much more than connectivity, but furthermore can help improve learning processes and methodologies so learning can become more impactful. For example, through partnerships with like-minded organizations, we have helped to digitalize and disseminate content through digital learning tools such as mobile apps.
One of the biggest differences from ten years ago is also that the nature of technology in an educational context, both as a medium and a means to enter the job market was still relatively immature as the landscape has evolved, we’ve come to understand the need to personalize and individualize learning so that we can improve learning outcomes in a meaningful way.
Giving people access to the right type of content is one aspect, another equally critical aspect is the human element. On top of the digital layer, students will still always need the engagement, inspiration and activation that comes from teachers and trainers who know about the topic. I believe that, even in the digital age, technology will never be able to replace this interaction, but rather can serve as an increasingly innovative medium for those critical learner-instructor interactions, such as through the Internet of Skills.
Digital inclusion through public-private partnerships
Today, there is a significant need for digital skills courses. Key technology areas such as AI, robotics and app development are advancing at such a rapid pace, which can make it difficult to ensure an effective transfer of competence to emerging workforces.
Such is the pace of change for topics such as these, public academic institutions will invariably struggle to take learning beyond a basic theoretical level. Public-private partnerships will therefore be key to addressing this, by developing advanced curriculums and delivering the necessary quality and scale of access.
As a sustainability pioneer in the private sector, we’ve understood the power of partnership, which is why we’re investing heavily in building out those partnerships with like-minded entities to create sustainable solutions in order to address the issues which the education sector faces today. A good example of this is the Ericsson Digital Lab program which is now live in several countries in partnership with local schools and community learning centers. The aim here is to share those competences that we have in-house on a much broader scale, addressing those critical skillset demands which are needed in tomorrow’s workforce.
This year, in response to the impact which COVID-19 has had on learning, we continuing these efforts by joining the UNESCO-led Global Education Coalition, launching Ericsson Educate and partnering with UNICEF to map school connectivity as part of the Giga project.
Through digital methodologies, and with a focus on improving digital skills for students across all communities, our commitment is to ensure that future generations continue to have the skills and knowledge to find opportunity in a changing digital world. This was what we set out to do when we launched Connect To Learn ten years ago, and this will continue to be our priority in this next critical decade of action.
Learn more
In 2020, Ericsson’s Connect to Learn program celebrates ten years of bridging the global digital divide. To find out more about our various programs, visit our Connect To Learn page.
