Tag: literacy

UNESCO Request for Input on Guidelines for Digital Inclusion – Your Weekend Long Reads

In 2018 around half the world’s population will be online, which is a major achievement. It also means there is still much work to be done to include the other half.

The next four billion users look different to those already benefiting from digital opportunities for livelihoods, life and work. New and diverse strategies are needed for their digital inclusion. (As this becomes more recognised it may herald the golden age of ICT4D, which already practises inclusive strategies.)

Studies show that, in general, the offline population is disproportionately rural, poor, elderly and female. When it comes to digital skills, women are 1.6 times more likely than men to report it as a factor limiting their use of the internet. Offline people often have limited education, low literacy and typically hold informal sector jobs.

In an increasingly online world, people without the required digital skills and literacy – the 750 million people who cannot read or write and the many more who have low literacy – now face a double exclusion, not only from full participation in the real world but also from opportunities in the digital one.

There is a need to both develop the digital skills and literacy amongst this group, as well as create inclusive digital solutions that are suitable for the digital skills they have today in order to ensure inclusion and equal participation for all.

UNESCO Guidelines for Digital Inclusion for Low-skilled and Low-literate People

Recognising that apps and services, if designed appropriately, can provide an entry point for low-skilled and low-literate people into digital usage and can support improved livelihoods and skills development, UNESCO is currently drafting a set of guidelines for more inclusive design of digital solutions. The work is though UNESCO’s partnership with Pearson.

The draft guidelines have been developed in consultation with an international expert group, and are informed by a landscape review Digital Inclusion for Low- skilled and Low-literate People and a set of fourteen case studies.

There are many excellent guides to effective digital development and how to practise user-centred design. In a way that complements and extends existing resources, UNESCO aims to focus the lens on low-skilled and low-literate users as much as possible with the guidelines.

The Target Audience

The primary target audience for the guidelines are digital solution providers – from large providers such as Google and Facebook, to start-ups – as well as implementation and development partners, such as FAO, GIZ, UNICEF and USAID, who can shape the terms of reference for digital solution development.

The secondary audience includes policy makers – for using the guidelines to create inclusive policies and regulatory frameworks, and mobile network operators and technology providers – for creating enabling environments for greater digital inclusion for all.

Seeking Public Input

In order for UNESCO to create guidelines that are informed, valuable and balanced, it is seeking input from the public. So this week there is one long read — the draft guidelines.

Please review and provide input on the document. When reviewing the guidelines, consider these broad questions:

  • Is the language and messaging clear?
  • Is anything missing? Are there parts that should be further developed? Should anything be removed?
  • What would be the ideal way to raise awareness of the guidelines and have them implemented by as many organisations as possible?

UNESCO is also creating a list of external resources to accompany the guidelines. Please feel free to suggest additional resources to the draft document.

Feedback should be sent by email to ICTliteracy@unesco.org by 30 April 2018.

All input is valuable and will be reviewed by UNESCO. Please note, however, that it is not possible to include all input in the final version.

Drawing on the collective feedback from a range of stakeholders, UNESCO will release a final version of the guidelines on 7 September 2018 in celebration of World Literacy Day.

Thank you in advance for your valuable feedback!

Image © Jayalaxmi Agrotech/Anil Kumar

Harnessing ICTs for greater access to education for girls and women

Harnessing ICTs for greater access to education for girls and women is a presentation given at the GWI (Graduate Women International) Conference in Cape Town. It covers some of the educational opportunities provided by technology uptake, what Pearson is doing in this space through Project Literacy and Every Child Learning, and the key challenges that remain to realising this potential.

Literacy, gender and mobiles

At the 2015 UNESCO Mobile Learning Week, I sat on a panel about literacy. Below are my speaking notes. Thank you to Ms Saniye Gülser Corat, Director for Gender Equality at UNESCO, for moderating the panel.

unesco_mlw_2015

Brief for the panel:

Due to a history of educational inequity, many more women than men are illiterate: globally, 64 per cent of illiterate people are women. Limited access to physical books and other learning materials disproportionately affects women, particularly in developing countries. Cultural norms can make it difficult for girls to leave home in order to attend literacy trainings or participate in outreach activities. Motherhood and assumed family obligations can further prevent women from building literacy skills in formal education settings.

How can mobile learning interventions break through barriers and promote literacy for women and girls in ways that are sustainable and scalable? How can mobile technology help develop essential literacies beyond reading and writing, such as media and technology literacy?

Three basic points I want to make

Much has already been achieved by mobiles for literacy.
The Goethe Institute of Johannesburg last month hosted an mLiteracy Networking Meeting to examine the opportunities and challenges for mobiles to increase literacy development, especially in Africa (see my speaking notes from the meeting).

It was an incredibly valuable, interesting and much-needed gathering by some of the old and new players in this space. The good news is seeing how far mobiles for literacy has come, how it has grown, how many young and old people it is reaching and engaging. How the mobiles for literacy field has not only provided another much needed medium to access reading material, but also allowed readers to comment and write their own pieces. It has given readers a voice, something not possible at such scale or immediacy in the print medium.

Gender sensitive does not equal gender specific.
In many cases we do not need initiatives focused only on women and girls, but rather on women and girls, men and boys. In other words, a holistic approach that is gender sensitive. Of course there is spill-over when particular genders are targeted – as with the example of Business Women, a mobile service for women entrepreneurs in Nigeria that has reached 100,000 women AND to which 20,00 men have also subscribed.

The need for specificity.
We know that local context is a key differentiator. There are different gender-related opportunities and barriers across and within countries, cities and communities. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and so when answering questions about improving literacy for women and girls, we need to provide broad enough responses that can be adapted and applied appropriately to specific audiences.

Pearson is playing a key role in improving literacy.
Last year Pearson launched Project Literacy, a five-year campaign to help ensure that by 2030, every child around the world has the support they need to become a literate adult. On the Project Literacy site, almost 200 organisations and people working in literacy have posted their challenges and inspirations.

Three suggestions for how to answer the questions

Take an ecosystem view.
For an initiative to be successful and scalable, it is essential to understand the full range of stakeholders, enablers and constraints in the mliteracy ecosystem. This view is recommended by the UNESCO Policy Guidelines for Mobile Learning.

For your initiative, who can increase visibility, lower costs, benefit from your content? Which policies support your work, or hinder it? Who provides the devices that the women and girls use, who supplies the network infrastructure? Which stakeholders have been the hardest to engage with? Interrogating the ecosystem was a key theme of the Goethe Institute mLiteracy Networking Meeting – a sign, I think, of how the mliteracy space has matured.

Target content and programmes.
From Yoza Cellphone Stories, and also other mliteracy projects, we know that the romance genre is very popular. Equally are stories that talk to the social issues of the audience: pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, drugs, mothering, job-seeking, education, etc. Content must be targeted to the communities who we want to consume and engage with it. This does not re-enforce gender stereotypes but rather recognises the different life experiences of women and girls, men and boys, and so normalises and mainstreams differences across these groups.

Content that develops the skills of readers supports the recommendation from the UNESCO Mobile Phone Literacy – Empowering Women and Girls project: “The particular needs of the targeted women and girls must be addressed and life-skills and empowerment opportunities offered.”

Questions for reflection: Give an example of how you have targeted specifically women/men, or girls/boys? And did doing so alienate the other group?

Increase visibility.
Visibility of resources and opportunities via mobiles remains a challenge – obscurity is the biggest threat to the many excellent initiatives. Visibility includes a number of aspects:

  • Marketing: It is essential that women and girls know about the opportunities.
  • The need for programmes – offline – that encourage reading, literacy, promote its benefits. Mobile is not a panacea and cannot operate while other barriers – cultural, economic, etc. – are not holistically addressed. Example: The Mobile-Based Post Literacy project by UNESCO in Pakistan first spent a long time engaging the village elders to ensure that they understood and ultimately supported the programme to improve the literacy of adolescent girls via mobile phones. This supports the recommendation from the reports of the UNESCO Mobile Phone Literacy – Empowering Women and Girls project: “Community sensitization and mobilization as well as political support are key ingredients for success.”
  • Recognition of mobile as a valid channel for supporting literacy. There are perceptions around the use of mobiles as distracting and undermining education. Research and case studies can change this – in fact this perception is already changing.

Questions for reflection: How have you increased visibility for your project? How have you engaged communities / gatekeepers to sensitize them and seek political support?

Closing words

A wonderful piece by Anathi Nyadu, a FundZa writer and attendee of the Goethe meeting, describes how he used to have to scrounge newspapers from the bin and steal books to satisfy his love of reading. But he believes his niece will never have to do either, thanks to mobile literacy.

Launch of phase 2 of bookly

booklyToday is the launch of phase two of bookly, a mobile/browser-based reading and writing platform in South Africa. In 2013 bookly won the Best Start-up award at the annual FutureBook Innovation Awards in London. It is great to see a South African initiative using the technology that is in the hands of our youth to improve literacy. This was the aim of Yoza Cellphone Stories, an initiative that I founded and run.

I received this from NATIVE VML, the company behind bookly:

I wanted to drop you a  line to tell you about bookly – both a reading and writing platform, with the goal of improving literacy in South Africa.

bookly was launched in May last year as an e-reader app on Mxit. We’ve had over 700 000 unique visitors, viewing more than 13 million pages. We added more than 450 books onto our platform and our users have added more than 250 000 books to their bookshelves! By partnering with local publishers,  bookly has also been instrumental in promoting South African authors. Thousands of reads have been achieved for the likes of Modjaji Books, Black Letter Media, Random House, MissWrite and Wordsmack and that’s just the beginning.

To get more people to read, we need more content that is relevant and personal to the kids. To get more content, we need South African to write their own stories.

This is where phase 2 of bookly comes in.

For phase 2 of bookly we are expanding into a writing platform. We have also created www.bookly.co.za, a mobile site which allows anyone to write a bookly.  A bookly  is a short piece of fiction that can be anything from poetry to a short story that is designed for mobile so the objective is to keep it concise but entertaining and provocative. A bookly can be written using anything from a feature phone up to a desktop PC. We will also be launching The bookly Award to encourage  kids to write on the platform. On top of that, we are working with writing workshops such as Sa-Yes, MissWrite, and Access to spread the word about bookly. For more info, please check out the attached documents.

More information about bookly and how to access it can be found in the press release, e.g. bookly can be found in the following ways:

Fiona Snyckers is mentioned in the press release as an author who publishes on bookly — she authored three of the best titles on Yoza in the Sisterz series.

I’m not exactly clear on their business model, but do know that they are not expecting to make millions out of bookly. Rather it is a vehicle for publishers and authors to create interest in their work, grow their brands and gauge interest in new works. With mobile, it is possible to get instant feedback from your readers. I learned this from comments received on Yoza stories. Further, bookly isa  vehicle for supporting literacy development and growing the author base in our country.

I wish bookly and NATIVE VML all the best. As Head of Mobile at Pearson I will be watching its progress with interest.

Advancing Literacy through Mobile Technologies: Empowering Women and Girls – Phase II: From Insight to Action

mEducation Alliance logoAt the recent mEducation Alliance Symposium in Washington, D.C., I presented, on behalf of my colleague, Diane Boulay, Advancing Literacy through Mobile Technologies: Empowering Women and Girls – Phase II: From Insight to Action. The proposed project builds on a global study headed up by Diane on how mobile phones are being used to empower women and girls by helping to improve their literacy skills.

For this project we are looking for partners for funding, technology support, content provision, and more.

The abstract is as follows:

Mobile technologies carry the power and potential to accelerate and scale-up literacy education efforts and to counteract the effects of social isolation and exclusion, especially in post-conflict/post-disaster settings. Building upon the findings of a concluding UNESCO global study analyzing initiatives aimed at empowering women and girls through literacy via innovative mobile technology-based programs, this project focuses on concrete action to reach more illiterate and neo-literate women and girls faster, better and with broader impact.