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MOBILE PHONES IN AFRICA:
TRANSFORMING SOCIETY AND (MAYBE) EDUCATION
Alexander Romiszowski
(Educational Technology 47/3, May-June 2007, pp60-61
An African Scenario from 2003
The country is Mozambique. The year is 2003. I was contracted to perform a baseline study and evaluate progress on the planning and implementation of an “Open School” pilot project. This was in the predominantly rural and sparsely populated Province of Nampula, situated in the North of the country. At that time, only about 6% of the secondary school age children of Mozambique were graduating from high school, partly because of limited access to secondary schools, partly due to high rates of drop-out. But that was the national average - the situation in Nampula was much more serious. Only around 3% of secondary school age children were even entering secondary education, and this was because the few existing secondary schools could accommodate no more than 3% of the potential candidates. The primary school system, which had to be almost totally rebuilt from scratch since the end of the civil war a decade or so before, was approaching the UN’s Millennium Development Goals of universal access. But the secondary and high school systems still had a long way to go.
The “Open School” project was designed to address this need. This model has been applied in a variety of forms in many developing countries, in order to address problems of limited access, especially to secondary and high school education. Perhaps the largest and best known application of this model has been in Indonesia, where the Sekolah Menengah Terbuka (Open High School) model was first used on a pilot scale in the 1970’s and then in the 1980’s and 1990’s became the principal manner in which access to high school education was extended to all. Similar approaches have been adopted, with varying levels of success, in several Asian, Latin American and African nations.
Basically, this model extends the existing secondary or high schools by linking them to a network of local learning centers. These learning centers have typically not been at all “hi-tech”, but consisted simply of a space, perhaps in a local church or mosque, where (mostly print-based and some audiovisual) learning materials could be stored and accessed, and where some local tutorial services could be provided by someone, not usually be a qualified teacher, who would receive some special training in how to support local students in the study of the learning resources.
Evaluation and grading, as well as specialist backup of the local tutors, would typically be provided by the qualified teachers in the “mother school”, by a combination of distance-learning methods and regular evening or weekend visits of groups of students from outlying “satellite” learning centers to the “mother school”. The existing high schools (and teachers) thus get to work on almost a 24-7 routine, and existing schools in effect expand their student intake by a factor of 200%, 300% or more.
In the case of the pilot project in Nampula, well designed print-based self instructional materials had been developed by staff of the Commonwealth of Learning in Vancouver, funded by the UK government. The teachers in the high schools of the five participating Districts (like counties in the USA – not school districts) were trained to perform their special duties and, at the time when I was performing my study, were engaged on selecting the first cohort of students. I particularly recall my days spent in Moma.
The town of Moma is actually a small seaside fishing village, but it is also the capital of quite a large District that goes by the same name. The candidates for the Open School project had traveled in from all parts of the District. Some had walked, or ridden a bicycle, 50 or 100 miles from their home village to the secondary school in Moma. One of the candidates that I met in Moma was a young lady who had walked 100 miles with a six year old son holding her hand and a six months old daughter suckling at her breast – she had nowhere to leave her children for the days it took her to get to Moma and try to register in the Open School. She showed a fantastic level of aptitude, motivation and determination, but just how frequently would she be able to repeat that trip?
This was one, among many questions investigated in my study. By what means, and how frequently, are the distant students going to make contact with their tutors? There was no public transport, and when it rains, the roads are impassable anyway. There was no effective postal system, and no telephone link from Moma, except to the Distict capital, Nampula, by primitive radio-telephone. Furthermore, in this pilot project, there was no provision for local tutorial support, as there was nobody available or qualified to give it. All tutorial support was to be provided by the existing secondary school teachers.
Other questions were concerned with upgrading the teaching resources in the central schools. Computers? Forget it! For one thing, there was basically no electricity in most of the existing high schools. In Moma, there was a diesel-powered generator that would be switched on at sunset and off at 9:00pm – three hours a day was all the diesel fuel they could afford. So, science laboratory sessions in the high school would be held after school hours, so that the kids could see what happens to a beam of light when it passes through a lens, or how the current in a circuit varies with the resistance.
Yet other questions addressed the administration of the system – how to get essential data from the students to the schools, from the schools to the Provincial capital and from there to the Ministry of Education. We designed a primitive but workable educational management information system (EMIS) based on word of mouth, written messages carried by truckers and cattle herders, transmission of complex numerical data by persons reading it to others via crackly radio telephone, and the final step (from Provincial capital to the Ministry) actually by Internet. Oh yes, there was also some limited possibility for communication back from the mother schools to the satellite learning centers by means of community radio - but only two of the five Districts involved in the pilot project had operational community radio stations at that time.
And “that time” was 2003 – just four short years ago. Have things changed? You bet – and largely due to the expansion of the mobile telephony infrastructure.
A European Scenario from 2003.
I could not include the use of mobile telephony as part of a proposed solution to the Open School’s communication problems, due to lack of the necessary local infrastructure at that time However, there were already at that time, several relevant mobile-technology-based-solutions available, or in stages of research and development. For example, in October 2001, a 4.5-million-Euro “m-learning project” was launched, supported by the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies (IST) program. Participant organizations included universities and commercial companies based in three EU countries - Britain, Italy and Sweden. By 2003, when Mozambique’s Open School pilot project was being implemented, this research agenda had developed a series of mobile phone based tools and applications for education that could have served the project well. The more “basic” m-learning tools included the following three.
Java games – educational games that can be used to check skills on any color-screen, game-enabled, mobile phone. One application in the UK, operational by 2003, was a game to teach the knowledge necessary to pass the theory test for a car driving license.
SMS quizzes – multiple-choice and other objective test format questions, presented on the screen of the phone and responded by a single key stroke. More complex questions may be presented in printed text, the learner responding with an SMS composed of a string of characters that communicate the responses selected, and get an instant reply.
SMS quiz author - an online authoring tool that allows you to create SMS quizzes. This is a web-based application which allows you to set up an automated response system for multiple-choice quizzes on the learner’s mobile phone.
These three tools could have been directly linked to the quizzes and other questions that were already included in the Open School project’s printed learning materials, so automating part of the tutorial process. Some more “advanced” m-learning applications included: an m-Portal - a learning community portal system that allows people to create their own “microportal” and visit the “microportals” of peers, tutors and mentors within the online community; a relatively sophisticated Learning Management System; a virtual tutorial system named IWT (Intelligent Web Teacher); an application named mediaBoard, that allows learners to send text (SMS) or picture (MMS) messages from their phones to contribute new content to both personal and collaborative web sites; and a variety of Pocket PC Learning Resources created for PDA’s and Pocket PCs.
Some of these, more powerful, examples of m-learning are most relevant when learners collaborate in some form of educational activity and the learning process becomes more autonomous and student-directed. They were probably a bit futuristic and sophisticated for the Mozambique Open School project, as it had been designed some years before its implementation in 2003. But hey! Why not re-design in order to profit from these new technological developments? In 2003, the time was not yet ripe, due to the lack of a basic mobile technology infrastructure. But today, things are so different…
Africa 2007: explosive - and intelligent - use of Mobile Telephony
In December 2006, as part of the work I am currently performing for the UNDP initiative to promote ICT for Development (ICT4D), I attended a session in a workshop on the use of ICT in education, held in the interior of Mozambique. Some participants raised concerns about having to learn about ICT while in their settings the infrastructure is still lacking. The facilitator responded through a provocative question: “Who of you is still not using a cell-phone?” It turned out that everyone in the room owned a personal mobile phone, and this fact helped to explain how near ICT was to them.
Africa is currently the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. Over the past five years the continent’s mobile phone use has increased at an annual rate of 65 percent - twice the global average. For example, in June of 1999, Kenya had 15,000 mobile phone subscribers. By the end of 2004 the country had 3.4 million subscribers, and by June of 2006 this number has grown to around 6 million - all this despite the fact that only about 200,000 Kenyan households have electricity. People living in rural areas have experience of playing radios or record players using car batteries or a combination of battery and solar panels. Nowadays they are using the same equipment to recharge their cell-phones.
This explosive growth led the BBC to produce a series of TV programs, screened in January 2007, on the impact that the mobile phone revolution is having on life in Africa. Paul Mason, the BBC’s “Newsnight” business correspondent, traveled throughout Kenya, interviewing people. He reported on events such as the reaction in Kibera, Nairobi, described as “Africa’s biggest slum”, to the problem of eviction by developers who have often illegally “bought” the land from corrupt local government officials: “one day the bulldozers arrive and your house has gone”. But not any more - in 2006, when eviction threatened the residents of Kibera, an activist group used mobiles to call thousands of people from many different settlements to sit down in front of the bulldozers. This was done – please take note – largely through the use of mass-mail SMS to user lists.
As I was writing this column, here in Mozambique, I read an article by Terry Calhoun, in the 2/15/2007 edition of the Campus Technology online newsletter: “I knew that in many countries, texting was a primary communication method — but my first exposure to the concept of large-scale, one to many communication via text messaging came with the news accounts of the evacuation of extranationals from Lebanon during the bloody and inane hostilities there in 2006 — the Swedish government used a series of text messages to get its citizens out of Lebanon, even before the United States had seriously mobilized its effort to just begin getting Americans out”. Hey, but the Kenyan slum dwellers were using this technology even before the Swedes in Lebanon! And it is interesting to note that the above “gem” was Calhoun’s way of introducing the main theme of his article – how US universities are learning to use text messaging: “many students are beyond regularly checking e-mail, so sending important and timely communications that way is increasingly fruitless”.
Mobile Tech in Africa: An Alternative Infrastructure and Business Model
There are other signs that Africa is inventing ways to use mobile phones that are hardly imagined in the developed world. In Africa, landline infrastructure was so poor that very few people could make a phone call at all. Rather than replacing existing, functional infrastructure, mobiles in Africa have created a new and different infrastructure. For example, most North American mobile phone users receive a bill for their usage every month. This model relies on infrastructure that is missing from many African economies: street addresses, a functional postal system, systems to check consumer credit; use of checks to pay bills. So, mobile network operators in Africa started selling scratch-off phone cards that allowed use of phones on a pay as you go basis. This strategy has led to an explosion in phone use, as well as creating thousands of new street-vendor jobs.
The community payphone is another innovation. These payphones are operated by local entrepreneurs – ordinary citizens who own a phone, buy airtime from the network and subsequently sell it to local people who don’t own phones themselves. A recent survey reported that 97% of Tanzanians now have access to a mobile phone thanks to the community payphone model. Similar figures are reported by most Sub-Saharan nations.
But what is the cost? When I buy a $4 scratch-off phone card here in Mozambique, I get around 20 minutes of call time to anywhere in the country. A dollar for five minutes of talk-time is still quite expensive for someone subsisting on a couple of dollars a day. But with my 20 minutes of talk-time, I also get credit to send 66 absolutely free SMS messages, nationwide. A large part of the local demand comes from the development by local entrepreneurs of innovative uses for this almost-free text messaging and text-based information access capacity. Here are some examples.
Information Access and Use. Many African fishermen now check the local fish market prices on their phones. Farmers can find out commodity prices before selling their stock. Some rural phone users have quadrupled their earnings because they have access to text-based information about potential buyers and prices.
Wap technology - which stands for wireless application protocol - allows people to access basic information on the Internet, like news summaries, through their mobile phone handset. According to July 2006 statistics, 61% of the BBC’s international Wap users came from Nigeria - over 400 thousand users, growing from zero a year before. A very small number of Nigerians access the BBC’s Internet news services by computer.
Banking and Financial Transactions - MTN, a South African mobile phone company, introduced a service that lets customers make simple banking transactions via SMS. In Kenya, a similar service, named M-Pesa, has been launched by Vodafone, through its local subsidiary Safaricom (I love the names). Vodafone says the service will soon go global “and then the 93 billion dollars of remittance money sent by migrants to developing countries each year could start flowing this way”. Western Union beware!
But what about Education 2007 – a “great leap forward”?
A recent study in Sub-Saharan African countries revealed that 96% of mobile phone owners reported regular or even daily use of mobiles for social and family reasons. The figure for non-owners was also high - 69%. Other common uses included: business – 25% and 11%; arranging meetings – 17% and 2%; religious reasons – 12% and 3%. But educational and general (non-business-related) information access uses were lagging way behind. Only 4% of owners and less than 1% of non-owners reported such use – and most of this use was to informally contact their school teachers. So it seems that systematic educational use of the mobile phone infrastructure is yet to come.
However, the European R&D scenario described earlier on suggests that the necessary technologies and some relevant tools and applications have been available for some time, just waiting for the communication infrastructure to catch up. This has now happened, and the time is now ripe for significant progress in technology-based learning, principally through intelligent applications of mobile telephony, in both voice and text mode. At about the time that this column will be published, a major conference focused on ICT applications in Africa (IST-Africa2007) will be held (May 9-11, 2007) in Mozambique (see. www.ist-africa.org). IST-Africa is an ongoing program whose goal is to apply the results of European ICT-related R&D to African problems. It is funded by the same organs within the European Union that funded the “m-learning project”. This event may well promote discussion, and maybe action, on the redesign of earlier initiatives, like the Nampula Open School project, to take advantage of the newly accessible, and relatively affordable, mobile infrastructure. Among over 130 papers and workshops accepted for presentation at the IST-Africa2007 conference (55 from African nations and 78 from elsewhere), there are 25 that address technology-enabled learning. Five of these deal with aspects of mobile technology, and it is significant that four out of these five are from Africa. So, here is one further sign that Africa may contribute to a “great leap forward” in the intelligent use of mobile telecommunication for educational purposes.
There are also some ongoing US-Africa “joint ventures” that may yield promising results. Nathan Eagle (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Peter Waiganjo Wagacha (University of Nairobi) have developed a mobile phone programming curriculum and are offering courses in both the USA and Kenya. The courses, in addition to teaching the technical skills of programming mobile applications, have an “emphasis on opportunity analysis and product marketing”. But will they direct some of the entrepreneurial energy latent in Africa towards “social applications development”, to address some of the enormous needs of (especially rural) populations in Africa, in areas such as health, community and education? I sincerely hope so. However, I am convinced that one way or another, we are on the verge of witnessing massive transformations in African education, both in terms of access and quality, as a result of intelligent applications of mobile technologies. As the slum dwellers in Kiberia demonstrated, these technologies enable the people in the communities to take control of their destiny. Who said that schools have to be set up by central government? That’s not how they came to be set up in early village societies. Africa may pioneer the mobile community school in the Global Village.
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