Impediment and challenges of innovations in mathematics education in Africa

In the past, common people were expected to have skills in reading, writing and arithmetic to succeed to have a job. Philosophy and/or Science were required for reaching a high position and belonging to the national elite. In this new millennium, information, knowledge, science and technology constitute a real power, and an educated person is asked to be able to access, interpret and possess information, to understand science and use technology. The role of education has moved towards forging connections between knowledge development and its application to the workplace. So, critical thinking skills, problem-solving and creativity remained the key factors to be a successful worker. Therefore innovations and new trends were necessary to face the change from the industrial society to the current information society and to fulfil the high expectations of this new millennium. The implementation of ICT has then been in the forefront of education reforms in the developed countries. ICT stood to make the greatest impact on education as a whole and particularly on Science, Mathematics and Technology. This required some planned and systematic strategies to introduce and support ICT in education, as well as in the society as a whole, in terms of software, hardware, training and maintenance support. The integration of ICT aimed to offer a powerful teaching and learning resource, and interesting opportunities for self-learning, distance and modular. The introduced innovations in ICT implementation, focused first on the vision of using ICT as a teaching and learning aid.