The practice of distance librarianship in Africa

If taking knowledge and training to the maginalised, isolated, underprivileged and the unreachable is the goal of distance education, then Africa is qualified to be the home of distance education. The paper talks about the inadequacy of education inherited in the continent at independence, and the yearning of various governments to improve educationally the lot of people, which gave birth to the obvious option of distance learning. Unfortunately the economic downturn affected proper funding of education and provision of resources including provision of library facilities. The corollary of this is that except for a handful of university libraries, library support service to distance learners is almost non‐existent. The scenario is painted of the practice in some universities where a distance learning mode is adopted. The paper concludes with some suggestions on what could be done to alleviate the agony of distance learners in the continent.