Mobile phones to promote adult education in Niger

In Niger, adult literacy rates are estimated at 30% (UNDP, 2012). Illiteracy is particularly striking in rural areas and among women, with only 10% of them having ever attended school in certain rural areas. While research efforts in the field have remained limited, studies have shown that traditional programs are characterized by low attendance, high drop-out, limited skills attainment and rapid skills depreciation. Some preliminary evidence also suggests information technologies offer new opportunities to address some of these constraints.

Cell-Ed is a mobile phone-based adult education program that uses a simple mobile phone without teachers, and was initially developed for Spanish speakers in Los Angeles. Cell-Ed’s key advantage as compared to traditional approaches is time saved (about 50 hours, as compared to 480 in a traditional program), flexibility, as adults can learn when, where and how they want, and self-paced learning.

The project aims to pilot and evaluate the impact of Cell-Ed’s mobile phone-based adult education program including both literacy and numeracy training. Adult education classes are delivered through “micro-modules” to learners, which consist of: short audio lessons on a particular concept, SMS reinforcing the voice lesson and SMS-based interactive “quiz” on the recent lesson. The platform will be built in Hausa, which is the primary indigenous language in Niger and northern Nigeria, and piloted in targeted villages to users with low literacy levels. The complete set of modules, which will take an average of 4 months to complete, will equate to one full adult literacy course offered by the Ministry.

Previous studies on this topic have shown that:

• adults who had participated in a mobile-enhanced adult education program in Niger were more likely to save, had more durable assets and higher food security two years after the program, but did not increase their income (Aker and Ksoll 2020).
• those who were offered Cell-Ed had higher self-esteem, although a minimum threshold of learning needed to be achieved (Ksoll et al, 2018).

To assess the impact of Cell-Ed in Niger, a research team from Tufts University and Sahel Consulting will lead an evaluation focusing on adult learning (reading in Hausa and numeracy) as the primary outcome.