Funding the online teaching and learning in developing countries: insights from Zimbabwe

While the outbreak of COVID-19 in December 2019 threatened educational activities in Higher Education globally, it renewed the interest in online learning and teaching in developing countries. To frame our understanding, we employed the Technological Readiness Index lens to investigate the institutional needs necessitated by the sudden uptake of online teaching and how these needs could be funded in one of the developing countries in Africa.15 Heads of Departments (HODs), working in different universities across Zimbabwe, participated in the in-depth interviews and WhatsApp discussions to generate data. Findings replicate that while HODs noted the indispensability of online teaching to embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), universities were confronted with trenchant institutional needs, for example, the absence of well-trained personnel, poor digital infrastructure and cyber security of which most of them emanated from inadequate funding. Considering this, the study proposes that rather than depending on traditional donor and stakeholder quota funding, governments of developing countries must liberalise internet trade markets through legal frameworks to de-monopolise the provision of internet services to reduce costs of erecting digital infrastructures and provision of services. This study, provides insights and extends scholarship on other funding strategies available for the digitalization of education in higher education.