An offline internet to support education in Senegal

The challenge of getting children into school remains a Getting children through school remains a major challenge across the African continent. With only 69% of students completing primary school, the continent has the lowest school completion rate of any region in the world. In Senegal, the rate stands at 61% (World Bank, 2021). In addition, 74% of children in Senegal experience low levels of learning (World Bank, 2019).

Despite improvements in enrolment rates and learning conditions at the national level in Senegal, inequalities across the country remain stark, and the quality of teaching is a key issue for public policy. In the Kédougou region, in the far south-east of the country, more than 2.1 million students face particularly unfavourable schooling conditions, due to a lack of suitable teaching materials, undertrained teachers, wide disparities in levels within classrooms, and limited access to internet to enrich lessons. To illustrate the scale of the issue, a child in Senegal receives 7.3 years of education on average, but only 4.8 years once adjusted for the actual quality of learning (World Bank, 2020).

Drawing on its experience in many countries, the project led by Bibliothèques Sans Frontières is built around three complementary components designed to address the learning gaps observed:

• designing and deploying an offline internet system in schools, allowing teachers and students to connect without using any data;
• creating rich digital educational content aligned with the primary school curriculum;
• training teachers to use and adopt the tools in order to evolve their teaching practices.

The intervention funded by FID enabled the roll-out of the "Ideas Cube kit" — tablets, computers, projectors, Kajou SD cards, and solar panels — in 70 schools in the Kédougou region. Its impact was evaluated through a randomised controlled trial, comparing these beneficiary schools with a control group of 70 schools. Throughout the two years of the project, teachers also received close, ongoing pedagogical support from Bibliothèques Sans Frontières facilitators, who visited each school once or twice a month to help them adopt the tools.

Research team:

• Luc Behaghel holds a chaired professorship at the Paris School of Economics and is a research director at INRAE. Affiliated with J-PAL, his research focuses on the economics of education and the evaluation of public policy in developing countries.
• Simon Briole is a lecturer and researcher at the Center for Environmental Economics Montpellier and an associate researcher at EVAL-LAB. His research sits at the intersection of the economics of education and environmental education.
• Mathilde Col is a development economist and affiliated researcher at EVAL-LAB. Her research focuses on the economics of education in developing countries and colonial history.
• Quentin Daviot is an economist, and the founder and director of EVAL-LAB. An impact evaluation expert for the World Bank since 2018, his research focuses in particular on student learning and development, and on teacher training.

To find out more:

• J-PAL, School Electricity and Native Language Digital Media to Improve Student Learning in Tanzania, 2014–2017.
• de Hoop, T. et al., Impact of Technology-Aided Activity-Based Learning Approaches on Learning Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from Community Schools in Rural Zambia, 2024.
• AIR, Zambia eSchool 360 Evaluation Project.