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Schools in Africa are going digital with encouraging results
Dec 8th 2012 | NAIROBI | from the print edition
What does delete all mean again?
UNTIL recently Grace Wambui, a 14-year-old pupil in Nairobi, had never touched
a tablet computer. But it took her about one minute , she says, to work out
how to use one when such devices arrived at her school, a tin shack in
Kawangware, a slum in the Kenyan capital.
Other students at Amaf School were no slower to embrace the new tool. Teaching
used to be conducted with a blackboard and a handful of tattered textbooks. Now
children in groups of five take turns to swipe the touch screen of the devices,
which are loaded with a multimedia version of Kenya s syllabus.
The tablets at Amaf School are an exception; they are part of a pilot project
run by eLimu, a technology start-up. But if it and other firms are right,
tablets and other digital devices may soon be the rule in African schools: many
are betting on a boom in digital education in Kenya and elsewhere. Some
executives even expect it to take off like M-Pesa, Kenya s hugely successful
mobile-money service.
Such growth in digital education would be timely. The number of children in
Africa without school places may have dropped in recent years, but the flood of
new pupils has overwhelmed state schools, which were already underfunded and
poorly managed. Business as usual is not working, says Mike Trucano, an
education and technology expert at the World Bank.
A for-profit venture, eLimu ( education in Swahili) is one of several local
publishers which are looking to disrupt the business of traditional textbook
vendors, which are often slow and expensive. It aims to show that digital
content can be cheaper and better.
Safaricom, the Kenyan mobile operator that pioneered the M-Pesa service, hopes
to repeat its success in digital education. It is developing classroom content,
from videotaped lessons to learning applications, that any of Kenya s 7,000
state secondary schools will be able to access online.
The prospect of many of Africa s 300m pupils learning digitally has not escaped
the attention of global technology giants either. Amazon has seen sales of its
Kindle e-readers in Africa increase tenfold in the past year. The firm s
developers are adding features to its devices with the African consumer in
mind: talking books, new languages and a longer battery life.
Intel, a chipmaker, hopes that education will generate much of the double-digit
growth it expects in Africa. The firm has been advising African governments and
helping them buy entry-level computers. In Nigeria Intel brought together MTN,
a telecom carrier, and Cinfores, a local publisher, to provide exam-preparation
tools over mobile phones, a service that has become hugely popular.
Such success shows that even the poor are willing to pay for digital education
as they already do for the conventional kind. In Kenya eight out of ten parents
pay tuition for courses outside school. Amaf School charges about $10 a month.
Start-ups such as eLimu hope to make money with micro-payments, very small sums
paid per download.
A bigger question is whether digital tools will actually improve education.
Early results are encouraging. In Ghana reading skills improved measurably
among 350 children that had been given Kindle e-readers by Worldreader, a
charity. In Ethiopia researchers found that even in the absence of teachers,
children figured out how to use tablets provided to them by One Laptop Per
Child, another charity, to teach themselves to read.
At Amaf School, average marks in science, for instance, went from 58 to 73 out
of 100 in a single term, says Peter Lalo Outa, the headmaster. That is good
news for eLimu. We want to prove that learning outcomes are improved, says
Nivi Mukherjee, the firm s boss, and not use technology for technology s sake.
from the print edition | Business