Organisational aspects and benchmarking of e-learning initiatives: a case study with South African community health workers.

South Africa desperately needs a comprehensive approach to fight HIV/AIDS. Education is crucial to reach this goal and Internet and e-learning could offer huge opportunities to broaden and deepen the knowledge basis. But due to the huge societal and digital divide between rich and poor areas, e-learning is difficult to realize in the townships. Community health workers often act as mediators and coaches for people seeking medical and personal help. They could give good advice regarding hygiene, nutrition, protection of family members in case of HIV/AIDS and finding legal ways to earn one's living if they were trained to do so. Therefore they need to have a broader general knowledge. Since learning opportunities in the townships are scarce, a system for e-learning has to be created in order to overcome the lack of experience with computers or the Internet and to enable them to implement a network of expertise. The article describes how the best international resources on basic medical knowledge, HIV/AIDS as well as on basic economic and entrepreneurial skills were benchmarked to be integrated into an e-learning system. After tests with community health workers, researchers developed recommendations on building a self-sustaining system for learning, including a network of expertise and best practice sharing. The article explains the opportunities and challenges for community health workers, which could provide information for other parts of the world with similar preconditions of rural poverty.