Open Educational Resource of Indigenous Games (OERiGA) Project

Many members of Generation-Z are unaware of the indigenous games their parents played during their childhood. This lack of knowledge, coupled with the non-formalized methods of preserving these games, has led to their endangerment. The issue is further exacerbated by the dominance of Western and post-colonial educational models in Africa, which often employ Eurocentric curricula disconnected from the sociocultural realities of indigenous students. The OERiGA project aims to systematically create an educational resource for indigenous games and advocate for their inclusion in mainstream curricula as teaching and learning tools. This initiative seeks to decolonize the curriculum while preserving the knowledge of indigenous games. The project uses a Participatory Action Research (Bhana, 2006) method, and has 25 collaborators based in 12 African countries. The figures report on 122 indigenous games from Southern Africa and 28 games from East Africa, which could potentially become extinct if not documented.

Reference

Bhana, A. (2006). Participatory action research: a practical guide for realistic radicals. In Research in practice: Applied methods for the social sciences, (Eds.) Blanche, M. T., Blanche, M. J. T., Durrheim, K., & Painter, D. Juta and Company Ltd. pp. 429-442