Reading in Pokigron, a village in Suriname's interior which is expected to be involved in the pilot project. Image (c) Ryan Dapremont.

Unlearning may seem like a strange way to start an education project. Yet we have so many preconceptions about what we need, what works and what doesn’t, and the role technology can play, that a blank slate could be the best possible starting point.

This is especially true in projects which depend on a partnership between multiple agencies. For the computer-aided learning project in Suriname, there are four partner organisations which aim to co-ordinate the new project, alongside three pilot villages and schools. The past few weeks have focused on the agreement of the final project proposal and the creation of a Working Group Chaired by the Ministry of Education and Community Development (MINOV). Also involved are UNICEF as the implementing partner and Peace Corps, whose volunteers are acting as observers for the initial phases, plus an organisation supplying the hardware and technical support. Each partner has a huge amount to bring to the table, but also brings with them a specific understanding and attachment to different elements of the project.

The CAL project in Suriname is a research pilot which will give laptops to each primary school child in three pilot schools in the country’s interior. The project is based in the principle of one-to-one computing which is “one model of incorporating technology into education that has gained tremendous traction in Latin America and the Caribbean… One-to-one refers to the ratio of digital devices per child so that each child is provided with a digital device, most often a laptop, to facilitate learning.” There has been much debate around the world about the value of one-to-one programmes, and many different values attached to, particularly, the technology aspects. There are also attachments to particular ways of working and principles. Only by engaging with all the aspects of this project, and by being open to both unlearning our own assumptions and learning from other experiences from all over the world can we develop the most appropriate programme from Suriname.

Some of the key questions are:

Over the next few weeks I look forward to the process of unlearning and building new understandings on a solid foundation.

The eLearning pilot class in El Moshamir, where students have been typing the alphabet and drawing with Paint for 10 months.

This is the seventh in a series of posts on designing innovative education solutions in Sudan, based on a mission that took place from September 3 to 23, and ongoing work. This series is by Panthea Lee, a consultant for UNICEF and principal at the service design firm Reboot. Some of the earlier posts are being published retroactively, partly due to the poor internet connectivity while the team was in country.

The team just returned from a trip to Gedaref State, in Eastern Sudan on the border with Ethiopia. In Gedaref City, the capital, we met with government agencies to discuss their programmes for out-of-school children. We also traveled to the 700-person village of El Moshamir, where Ahfad University for Women and several partners (academic, public and private sector, and NGOs) are running an eLearning pilot. The project aims to give out-of-school children an accelerated education so they can then integrate into the formal schooling system (if they are younger) or can learn basic numeracy and literacy skills that will help them in the future (if they are older and less likely to go to school).

The school set up for the eLearning program is a 50-square-foot room with a bed (the school doubles as the teacher’s home), a child-sized table with six chairs (the 22 children thus attend school in shifts), and a suitcase containing the prized goods: three second-hand laptops and one mobile broadband dongle. There is a solar panel outside, the only source of electricity in El Moshamir – the few villagers who have mobile phone come to charge their phones at the school, the only benefit most families receive from the eLearning project.

When the pilot came to the village 10 months ago, 22 children (of the 100+ in the village) were selected to participate. There were good intentions and lengthy reasons for the particular selections; nevertheless, this has caused tension in the community. For the pilot represents the only accessible shot at education in the village. There is a local khalwa, a religious school, attended by 50 children. But there, children are only instructed in the Koran, and in the Arabic alphabet so they can read the Koran. Though the structure, curriculum, and quality of differ from khalwa to khalwa nationwide, in El Moshamir, the teacher is focused exclusively on the principles of Islam. Such an education may be rich in religious importance, but it limits students’ future opportunities.

In the past 10 months, the eLearning students have learned basic computer skills: they can type the Arabic and English language alphabets, and they can use Paint to create basic digital art. They also have been assigned email addresses, which they use to email each other. The computers, however, still haven’t been loaded with educational content (which have yet to be created, with no set timeline for development) and so, for 10 months, the children have been practicing the same alphabet letters and drawing the same shapes in Paint. Part of the rationale was that in the absence of educational software, children could take advantage of the equipment available anyway and get started on some kind of learning. But without educational content on the laptops, it is impossible to evaluate the validity and utility of the program.

For the time being, it seems that the only way to get an education is to leave the village. And in all of El Moshamir, there is one youth who had the opportunity to do so. Abdallah was educated in Khartoum, a six-hour drive away, from the ages of 7 and 14. A wealthy man in the area recognized talent in the precocious young boy, and decided to support his education. Abdallah is a middle child, and most of those educated in the khalwa are as well, as responsibility for tending to the family’s cattle fell to their older siblings, they then had the privilege of attending school. But as soon as his brothers got married, he had to return to El Moshamir to tend to the cattle. It’s been three years since he returned, and he is still frustrated about being pulled away in his final years of school.

“Chasing sheep is not the way to help my family,” he says. “If I am educated, I can get a job, earn money, and help my family and my village. I can build a well here, get us clean drinking water, send more of my siblings to school.” But his pleas fell on deaf ears.

Most children in El Moshamir, and other rural villages in the region, never go to schools (other than the khalwa), and Abdallah’s parents did not see why he should. Primarily from nomadic communities – the tribes that used to pass through El Moshamir began staying in the village since a mosque was erected 13 years ago – they start helping their families with their cattle herds as early as the age of 7.

“It was fine that he to school in Khartoum, but what will he really get out of it anyway?” asks Abdallah’s father, a former cattle herder that now farms seeds because he has Abdallah and another son to tend to the goats. “He’s not going to stay in the city anyway. He will be coming back to the village sooner or later, and you don’t need to know any poetry here.”

A schoolteacher in rural Sudan

This is the sixth in a series of posts on designing innovative education solutions in Sudan, based on a mission that took place from September 3 to 23, and ongoing work. This series is by Panthea Lee, a consultant for UNICEF and principal at the service design firm Reboot. Some of the earlier posts are being published retroactively, partly due to the poor internet connectivity while the team was in country.

Our Sudan team is currently focused on holistic methods for improving the education system, accounting for not only students, but teachers, governments and other partners. To that end, we have three areas of focus in Sudan. In previous posts, I touched on what our team aimed to do for students and teachers, and in this last post I will discuss how governments and other educational partners can better monitor and encourage progress throughout their school systems.

3. Real-Time Programme Information Tracking

“We have enough information to evaluate past programmes. We need information to help us plan ahead,” said a senior official at the Ministry of Education. This is a sentiment that we’ve heard time and time again in our first week here, from UNICEF staff, from their local partners, and from their government counterparts.

Technology has given us low-cost, scalable solutions for sophisticated information management – even in the most resource-constrained contexts. How we can collect and manage data in real-time so that it’s useful to teachers and educators at the school level, and to UNICEF and governments at the district, state, and national level?

Here, RapidSMS comes to mind. RapidSMS is an open-source enterprise-level SMS framework co-developed by UNICEF that has been extremely handy for, amongst other things, the distribution and tracking of supplies. In Nigeria, UNICEF recently distributed 6 million bednets in areas with high risk of malaria. Each lorry of bednets was tagged with a tracking code that stays with the shipment through the distribution chain. When they arrive at each destination, the distribution staff or partner texts in the tracking code to a free shortcode so UNICEF can track the supplies down the chain. Data is automatically stored in a database, where UNICEF can analyze it. There is also an electronic record generated for each contact that texts into the system, so when hiccups in distribution occur, UNICEF can immediately call the person and course-correct as needed. When working with partners that may be forgetful about texting in, incentives for timely reporting can be useful – distribution staff might, for example, receive a nominal token of appreciation (e.g. phone credit) each time they text. UNICEF has applied this model in other contexts, including the distribution of textbooks in Zimbabwe.

These examples only scratch the surface of how new technologies can be used to support quality education systems and all the various stakeholders involved. Investing in strengthening systems so that they can develop and maintain their own innovative education initiatives is far more cost-effective and sustainable than continuing to fund one-off projects. Maybe that’s where UNICEF’s skills and resources would be best focused.

A teacher in a secondary school in Khartoum.

This is the fifth in a series of posts on designing innovative education solutions in Sudan, based on a mission that took place from September 3 to 23, and ongoing work. This series is by Panthea Lee, a consultant for UNICEF and principal at the service design firm Reboot. Some of the earlier posts are being published retroactively, partly due to the poor internet connectivity while the team was in country.

Our Sudan team is currently focused on holistic methods for improving the education system, accounting for not only students, but teachers, governments and other partners. To that end, we have three areas of focus in Sudan. My previous post focused on skills training for children, and this one will examine our second goal, centered around teacher development and support.

2. Support for Teachers and Educators

Education projects often focus on students, but it is often teachers that are a major hurdle to an effective education system. Especially in rural areas, where teachers are likely to be demotivated, poor teacher performance sabotages the children’s progress. Thus, making the day-to-day lives of teachers easier and more rewarding is key to decreasing teacher turnover and increasing teacher performance and morale.

And before we foist laptops on them, heralding the dawn of a new age of learning, teachers need to understand the benefit of technology in their own work and for themselves. Thus, by being provided with simple tools to alleviate their work burden, teachers have the opportunity to become comfortable with – and see the value of – technology at their own pace. This sets them up well to support eLearning and other Tech4Ed programs in the future.

One way to support teachers is to give them feedback. Being a teacher is always a thankless job – you work long hours with often ungrateful children and parents, you’re asked to fill out a sizable number of forms and reports which then get sent into a bureaucratic black hole, and, especially in rural areas, you are often ill-trained for the job and have no support networks to turn to. We’ve been examining ways that technology can help alleviate these problems.

Take an example from Afghanistan, where UNICEF has recently begun working with community health workers (CHWs) around household compliance for polio vaccinations. Like many rural teachers the world over, the CHWs feel underappreciated and they do not understand the value of the data they are required to collect and send in – once they complete and return a form, it goes into another black hole, never to be heard from again. UNICEF is now piloting a project around the collection and management of vaccine compliance data through basic mobile phones, where the CHW-collected data is sent in real-time to the Ministry of Health and UNICEF. UNICEF can use its substantial data processing capacity to then support the CHWs in contacting the local sheikh in neighbourhoods where households are non-compliant. CHWs are always thanked for their input into the system via SMS – don’t ever underestimate the value of a simple thank you – and the positive reinforcement motivates them to continue their work.

Such as a system could be immensely helpful for rural schools, where teachers often feel as if their efforts were for naught. In this case, the CHW would be the teacher, polio vaccine compliance would student attendance (or some other indicator such as completion of assignments), and the sheikh could be the students’ parents who, in Sudan, typically value education highly but do not have easy entry points through which they can engage with their children’s progress.

Both the CO and the Ministry of Education have stressed the importance of teacher support, and we’re excited to be moving this concept forward in the coming weeks.

The kindergarten class at the Amil Institute, a school for deaf children in Khartoum. The students range from age 5 to 12.

This is the fourth in a series of posts on designing innovative education solutions in Sudan, based on a mission that took place from September 3 to 23, and ongoing work. This series is by Panthea Lee, a consultant for UNICEF and principal at the service design firm Reboot. Some of the earlier posts are being published retroactively, partly due to the poor internet connectivity while the team was in country.

One challenge faced by all large development organizations, UNICEF included, is that other, small organizations often think you have the resources to help make their projects happen. While this is sometimes the case, such thinking ignores the wisdom and expertise these seasoned organizations can bring to bear on projects themselves.

In this current project in Sudan, we are focused on strengthening the education system in a holistic way, and from a myriad of angles. Education projects often focus exclusively on children, but the service providers (government and partners) and the agents delivering the service (teachers) are equally important for a well-functioning system. To that end, we have three areas of focus in Sudan. This post will discuss the first one, and then in subsequent posts I will discuss the other two.

1. Relevant Education and Skills Training for Children

We explore how we can help marginalized children and youth gain the basic knowledge and practical skills they need to thrive, whether that is through reintegrating out-of-school children into the formal schooling system or helping unemployed youth get a stable, rewarding job.

Currently, many of the skills youth learn through development programmes are practical (e.g. sewing), but without high market demand. We need to train children on the skills of the future (e.g. technical skills, such as computer programming) that can lead to tangible, attractive job opportunities and improved futures.

There are many examples of UNICEF projects in this vein, including a youth training programme in Palestine in 2010. Through Souktel, a Palestinian NGO, youth were taught basic computer programming skills and launched the first open-source software community in the country. Their skills have proved valuable, as other NGOs (such as Teachers Without Borders) now approach their talent pool for programmers to support their work.

Skills training is also a great way to bring together the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Take UNICEF Kosovo’s Innovation Lab. The Lab’s inaugural activities centered around technology training for youth in Pristina, sponsored by local businesses interested in fostering skills they could benefit from. The Lab has since partnered with the national Ministry of Health – the Lab provides technical support for the Ministry’s needs, and the Ministry entrusts the youth with meaningful projects and provides a staff member to sit in the Lab and direct them in building data and monitoring systems. The Lab adds much-needed technical capacity to the Ministry and provides eager, ambitious youth with good work.

There seems to be interest in a similar model here in Sudan — there is certainly demand from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Communications and IT — so we are exploring the idea of how a Lab here may be structured and run, and what a proof of concept might look like. More to come!

Kindergarten student in a school in Khartoum.

This is the third in a series of posts on designing innovative education solutions in Sudan, based on a mission that took place from September 3 to 23, and ongoing work. This series is by Panthea Lee, a consultant for UNICEF and principal at the service design firm Reboot. Some of the earlier posts are being published retroactively, partly due to the poor internet connectivity while the team was in country.

It’s been three days in hot, dusty Khartoum and things have been going very well. We’ve had the chance to sit down with various staff members of the Sudan Country Office (CO) to hear all of their different perspectives on the operating environment at present, and UNICEF’s ongoing programmes, as well as with our government counterparts at the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. Both are very interested in the potential of digital learning systems and how technology can strengthen their education systems. Before diving into the work in the coming posts, it’s probably explain a little bit more about what we’re doing. Working with the CO, I will be assessing their ongoing e-learning pilots, doing more design research and analysis of the current state of education for out-of-school and otherwise marginalized children, and managing community outreach for the further development of innovative education programmes. I’m especially excited to be researching user needs for educational technologies and programmes. Prior to the mission, I had the chance to speak with some experts at UNICEF NY on serving children with disabilities — 1 in 3 children who are out of school have a disability. The statistic is shocking. In some preliminary conversations with the CO, it seems that they are also committed to greater accessibility in education (and specifically for children with special needs) so this is an area I’m eager to dive deeper into over the coming weeks.  While the work with the CO is hugely exciting, I’m also eager to be field-testing the latest version of Child Friendly Technology, a global framework being developed by UNICEF for its COs. The framework addresses how to leverage technology for education, and how to design programmes that put educational priorities and the needs of children first, rather focusing primarily on technology. It is hoped that the framework will allow UNICEF COs identify and learn from common mistakes in using technology for education. These include:

• Incorporating technology that is not easily usable by the target population due to language, culture, technological hurdles, or other factors.
• Bringing in technology that cannot be maintained within the local context, rendering programmes fragile and unsustainable.
• Developing programmes that commit the CO to a particular vendor or approach.
• Developing programmes that are not easily adaptable to or extensible for evolving needs and environments.
• Ending up with a technology inventory that stays unused, and education initiatives remain unchanged.
• Incorporating hardware and software that were designed for OECD environments.

While its initial focus is on technology in education, the CFT framework is also broad enough to be applicable to other sectors as well. Eventually, modules for other sectors can be developed as well. Over the course of the next year, various prototypes will be testing across select UNICEF COs – with iterative refinements in between – to make the framework ever more relevant and useful given COs’ operational realities.

UNICEF Sudan education specialist Buthayna Abdel Hakam interviewing a group of mothers in El Moshamir.

This is the second in a series of posts on designing innovative education solutions in Sudan, based on a mission that took place from September 3 to 23, and ongoing work. This series is by Panthea Lee, a consultant for UNICEF and principal at the service design firm Reboot. Some of the earlier posts are being published retroactively, partly due to the poor internet connectivity while the team was in country.

I have the pleasure of working with an immensely talented team on the ground in Sudan. It’s lean, but each person is contributing a unique set of expertise and brings a wealth of experience. From UNICEF, I’m honoured to be working with

• Barbara Reynolds, Senior Education Advisor, who has been with the agency for nearly 20 years. She has been in a variety of education related and senior leadership roles in Botswana, Nigeria, China, Angola, Liberia, and Zambia — she’s seen UNICEF’s work evolve immensely in that time.
• Christopher Fabian, co-lead of the Innovation Unit in NY, brings a wealth of knowledge on UNICEF’s global work in using technology for development. In addition to ICT4Ed, this includes groundbreaking work in real-time monitoring and evaluation, SMS-based information collection, tracking of supplies, communication for development, and explorations of vocational training.
• Edgard Seikaly, a technical specialist in the Education unit of UNICEF Supply Division, has diverse international experience in the field of manufacturing and social standard setting. In recent years, he’s been involved in launching new education kits as well as international innovation initiatives in the field.
• Buthayna Abdel Hakam, education specialist with UNICEF Sudan, has had a long career in education in Sudan. She served the Ministry of Education for many years, in some of the most challenging environments in Sudan including Darfur and South Kordofan, and joined UNICEF four years ago to manage some of its education projects.

We are supported by UNICEF’s HQ staff in the Education Section and from a special Disabilities advisory group; in the Country Office, we’re lucky to have the support of UNICEF’s Education, Communications, and Youth sections. Globally, we have networked with COs doing innovative work using technology (Suriname, Madagascar, Kosovo, Uganda) as well as the East Africa Regional Office.

Together, we are focused on increasing access to quality and relevant basic education for children in Sudan. It’s quite the team, and I’m eager to see how things evolve in the coming few months.

Out-of-school children in the Eastern Sudanese state of Gedaref.

This is the first in a series of posts on designing innovative education solutions in Sudan, based on a mission that took place from September 3 to 23, and ongoing work. This series is by Panthea Lee, a consultant for UNICEF and principal at the service design firm Reboot. Some of the earlier posts are being published retroactively, partly due to the poor internet connectivity while the team was in country.

There are four million out of school children in Sudan, largely comprised of demobilized child soldiers, nomadic populations, street children, girls, and children with disabilities.

Appropriate technology interventions can be one way to bridge the digital divide and ensure that there is fair and standard access to information and opportunity.

Many ‘innovative’ education projects start with someone hearing about some project (usually a pilot) that’s going on somewhere else. If we’re not careful, projects can then easily become about procuring as many of ‘that other solution’ as possible within budget, and deploying locally. Once implemented, programme staff then realize a misfit between the imported technology and their local challenge. When it comes time to scale, they might want to try a different solution – on better suited to their context – but are tied to the original intervention, lest they want to admit failure and start over. (The World Bank recently released a report saying it has a 30 percent success rate with its ICT4D projects. This honesty is refreshing, not to mention valuable  for the relevant communities of practice – we’d all be better off if we could talk about failure openly and without fear of unfair judgement.)

UNICEF is keen to embrace a user-centered approach, but needs more relevant information about various users (children, parents, teachers, governments, and other duty bearers) to do so. While the Ministry of Education and various partners are swimming in statistics – albeit sometimes outdated – about children, there is often little qualitative data to give context and nuance to the numbers. Knowing that this is a too-common tragedy in development, the solutions we develop here with the Sudan CO will be tailor-made and will use exclusively scalable, adaptable open-source technologies. We will work with local firms and individuals; if the technical knowledge doesn’t exist, we can help build it.

I’m looking forward to the next three weeks here in Sudan, and for the coming few months as the project evolves. We welcome any feedback, ideas, or suggestions on the project — just leave a comment with your contact details, and we’ll be sure to get back.

Over the next several weeks we will be using this blog to tell the stories of Technology for Development efforts happening in UNICEF country offices – as a complement to internal discussions, we will post links and resources on this site as a way to share some past successes and failure. If you would like to add a story please DM/@/email us and we’ll put it in the schedule.

Here is our dissemination plan. Please feel free to suggest changes to the plan – it’s a work in progress.

We will be posting these out about every three days.

Part 1: Some Key Projects: (3rd and 4th week of Feb)

• Kosovo’s Technology for Development / Innovation Lab (background and blog)
• Project Mwana: HIV/AIDS engagement in Malawi and Zambia using RapidSMS (funding proposal structure and blog)
• Further background on Mobile Service Providers study (#2)  (blog posts on methodology, who was surveyed, etc.)

Part 2: Some Specific Countries (1st week March)

• Rwanda Lancet article on Rwanda RapidSMS for reducing maternal and neonatal mortality + project background
• Mixed Bag: Specific country case studies (10 case studies of mobile tech4dev projects across country offices.
• Uganda: RapidFTR project and its field testing and preliminarydeployment in Uganda

Part 3: Some abstract thinking needing development (2nd week march)

• How to engage mobile service providers
• Child friendly technology (in Education) framework
• Draft Mobile Money in UNICEF report
• Overview of Mobile Projects in UNICEF
• Mobile Service Providers and their work with CO’s (report summary from a 6 month research project recently completedCTO)

Dustin York worked with UNICEF’s Innovation Team as this past summer’s DesignMatters Fellow from the Art Center College of Design (Graduate Media Design). He reflected on his major projects and collaborations and produced a video to describe his experience—what he contributed, learned, and ultimately took away from it.