The scenarios can be completed in a lesson or for a homework using the videos and articles on the Our Africa website.  The content on the website will get pupils started but many of the scenarios will also require pupils to think for themselves!

There is not supposed to be a single ‘answer’ to the scenarios.  They are intended as a stimulus for discussion and a means of enabling pupils to see beyond abstract measures of development such as GDP and literacy rates (though they address many topics rather than just development).  It is hoped that through the Our Africa website pupils will begin to understand what it really means to live in a developing country and become more familiar with the threats to progress that many African countries face.

Finding a scenario

The easiest way to find a scenario based on a topic is to browse by country or topic. At present, most scenarios relatemost clearly to the geography curriculum, but teachers of other subjects are of course welcome to tailor them to their needs.

Human Geography

Development: Education, Healthcare, Inequality, Interdependence, Poverty, Trade

Economic activities: Farming, Industry, Mining, Tourism

Population & Settlement: Employment, Migration, Population density & distribution, Population growth, Refugees, Urbanisation

Resources: Energy, Food, Forests, Minerals, Water, Sustainable Development

Physical Geography

Ecosystems 

Environmental hazards: Floods

Environmental issues: Conservation, Deforestation

Weather & Climate

Possible approach

The scenarios might be used to introduce a new topic or to add an extra dimension to a unit of work.  If using the scenarios in a lesson, you may want to start by showing pupils a related video from the website (see ‘What to watch’) and then briefly discussing anything they noticed.  Having distributed copies of the scenario, pupils should be directed towards the Our Africa website and encouraged to explore the different pages (some may ultimately need help finding the relevant information - see ‘Where to go’).  Pupils can then work individually or in pairs to come up with a response (it may be useful to give pupils a specific amount of time to explore and come up with a response and a separate period of time to write out their response).  Once pupils have written out their responses, you may want to bring the class together to discuss what they came up with.

If some pupils finish writing out their responses ahead of others, you might give them the opportunity to explore the website by perhaps asking them to try to find three things they did not know about Africa (or a particular country).  These findings could be fed back to the rest of the class at the end of the discussion about the scenario.

If using the scenarios as a homework activity, you may want to discuss pupils’ responses to the scenarios at the beginning of the following lesson.