Raison d’être de l’Université Virtuelle Africaine (UVA)

Abstract

Based on the concept of « hypertelie » developed by Gilbert Simondon to designate an over-adaptation of a technical object in an environment that is not adapted to its functioning, this article proposes to approach the launch of the African Virtual University (AVU) such as the overvaluation and the anticipated introduction of ICT and digital culture in higher education in sub-Saharan Africa by the World Bank in 1997. In this perspective, the launch of AVU as a private enterprise, followed by its continuation by its transformation into an intergovernmental organization, corresponds to a mode of “utilitarianization” of the technique allowing the World Bank to influence the process of adaptation of traditional universities to the medium of online education and to favor the emergence of new types of institutions. Two new types of public universities are observed, the first with the creation in 2013 of the Virtual University of Senegal, and the second with the launch in 2012 of the Pan-African University which presents the same continental-scale model of establishment in traditional universities as the AVU and is supposed to integrate the latter as the sixth institute dedicated to online education and must therefore articulate its pan-African ideology to the neoliberal and technicist ideology of the World Bank that still characterizes the AVU today.

Keywords

• Africa
• higher education
• virtual university
• ICT
• Simondon
• myth