Impacts of COVID-19 on Higher Education in Developing Countries and the Strategy of Using ICTs for e-Teaching from the Catholic University of Mozambique Domingos Rhongo and Bianca Gerente 1 Faculty of Tourism and Informatics Management, Catholic University of Mozambique, Pemba, Mozambique drhongo@ucm.ac.mz bgerente@ucm.ac.mz Abstract: COVID-19 has tested the organizational capacity of the education system in Mozambique, including the higher education level when it became mandatory to close all face-to-face teaching activities. To respond to this challenge and continue with the noble mission of teaching, the Catholic University of Mozambique implemented a hybrid model, specifically through digital platforms, even though it was aware of the various resource limitations on the part of teachers and students. This strategy would be determinant for a successful path to the purpose of "never stop teaching and learning." This paper attempts to answer questions that arose at introducing this new teaching model during the COVID-19: (i) What skills did teachers have to respond to ICT-mediated teaching? (ii) What strategies were used to circumvent the difficulties arising from COVID-19 for Teaching and Learning? (iii) What kind of skills, difficulty, and behaviour characterized the students to correspond to a 100% online teaching system? and (iv) What platforms and instruments were used to respond to this teaching model? The paper first seeks answers from exploratory interviews with teachers about the use of ICTs in teaching and learning and subsequently presents some challenges in three dimensions (institutions, teachers, and students) of which their consideration can lead to a path in the immersion of the technologization of teaching. In methodological terms, a qualitative approach was used, where interviews were conducted with a sample of teachers from this university who were part of the frontline of the process. The results show that for the case study, it was possible, to teach and learn through Moodle platforms, Google Classroom, interacting through Zoom, Google Meet, and using Skype as a communication tool with students. Keywords: Higher education, e-learning, digital platforms, and COVID-19. 1. Introduction and Background In Mozambique, the first case of coronavirus (COVID-19) was registered on March 22, 2020 (Mapote, 2020; Silva et al., 2020). In the beginning, there were so many doubts and uncertainties about the future, some hypotheses pointed to a possible worldwide collapse due to the rapid spread of the pandemic, so many countries were following the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines of taking measures of social distancing and isolation to safeguard people's lives; around all these several questions were arising such as: how would services be offered and accessed? This is how the world reinvented itself like a phoenix, migrating many services and events to the online modality. This apocalyptic scenario reached the education sector in particular in higher education. According to UNESCO, with the social detachment, the continuation of learning activities required a financial effort from higher education institutions, a didactic change from teachers and students that in some situations would be for the first time using a digital platform (UNSECO, 2020). This scenario was more impactful in developing countries, particularly in Africa where there are infrastructure and connectivity problems and the percentage of homes with an internet connection is around 17% (Rhongo et al., 2018; UNSECO, 2020). In the international context as a way to contain COVID-19, higher education was forced to fully migrate from the traditional classroom model to the online modality so as not to stop with the teaching and learning process(Bao, 2020). Higher education in Mozambique in 2020 was composed of a total of 53 educational institutions, among 19 Universities, 27 Institutes, 4 Schools, and 3 Academies. There were 22 public and 31 private, and a total of 230,000 students, with 14,000 teaching staff (CNAQ, 2020; MCTESTP, 2020). In Mozambique, some initiatives such as tv schools, Radio-School were promoted at the beginning of the pandemic as a way to make up for the absence of face-to-face teaching in the secondary education (TVM, 2020) and digital platforms in higher education; however, the work focuses on higher education due to the environment of ICT use at this level, contrary to the resistance and difficulties of acceptance found in secondary education (Caldeira, 2011; TVM, 2018). 1.1 Context of e-Learning at the Catholic University of Mozambique 286 Proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on e-Learning, ECEL 2023