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Summary: Mobiles for Youth Workforce Development sessions at the mEducation Alliance Symposium

Posted in development, education, m4D, mywd, wait... what?, youth, youth workforce development, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

September’s mEducation Alliance Symposium included a special track around mobile technologies for youth workforce development (mYWD) as well as a session to discuss a new mYWD Working Group,  which is now up and running online. (Join by first registering at the mEducation Alliance website, then clicking here to join the mYWD Working Group.)

If the topic of mobile technologies and youth workforce development is of interest, don’t miss the October 15th event Innovations in Mobiles for Youth Workforce Development.  Among others, we’ll have the brilliant Phil Auerswald (@auerswald) helping us frame what we mean by ‘innovation’ in the mYWD space. RSVP info here.

In the meantime, here are some highlights from the mYWD sessions at Symposium:

Session 1: Mobiles for Youth Workforce Development (mYWD): Taking Stock of mYWD started with a presentation on the GSMA’s ‘Shaping the Future report by Lauren Dawes.  Then we heard from Theo Van Rensburg Lindzter (M-UBUNTU) and Thabang Mogale (Millenials as Mobile Educators).

  • The GSMA report found that education was a key priority in the lives of the young people surveyed, preceded only by family and health. Respondents also prioritized a good career and noted that they need to improve their skills to find better work. Only 25% of the young people surveyed listed the classroom as their primary source of education. Word of mouth was their main source of information on employment. The single largest barrier to educational information noted was lack of funds; meaning services need to be affordable if aiming to reach the majority of young people. Mobiles are an important asset for young people, ranking above clothing and shoes. Voice is a favored service among youth; most do not use their mobiles to access data. Key recommendations for mLearning and informal education include that youth are enthusiastic about the possibility and potential of learning and improving their chances of finding meaningful work via their mobiles. Linking mLearning to existing activities and behaviors will bring better results. Targeting the whole family is important as youth may not always be owners of mobiles, and parental gate-keepers may not see value in a handset. The youth surveyed expressed willingness to receive advertising in return for access to content and services.
  • The Millennials as Mobile Education Providers project takes place in South Africa. The pilot project grew out of a partnership between Durban University of Technology (S Africa), the M-Ubuntu Project (Sweden, S Africa, US), Sprint Re:Cycle (US), and six rural and township schools in S Africa. A key part of the program is working to shift attitudes from “youth as a problem” to “youth as untapped resources who can engage, lead and contribute to training initiatives.” The project includes subsidized internships for unemployed or out of school youth that tie vocational skills training to related community service; service learning as a credit-bearing component of university degree programs; in school service learning opportunities for secondary school students; service that meets an identified community need and upfront training accompanied by ongoing support and mentorship. The program utilizes recycled devices as platforms for curriculum-aligned educational content. University students serve as literacy/numeracy coaches for students in under-performing rural and township high schools, especially students who are preparing for graduation exams, and where there is typically a very low rate of passing. Young people like Thabang serve as mobile tech apprentices at schools, handing device charging, repair and content transfer for teachers. Thabang has found incredible personal success through the program, finding a useful skill. He emphasized the numerous global connections made through the program which have motivated him to keep working and striving to be his best.

Session 2 was Connections and Content for Out of School Youth, facilitated by Kimberley Kerr from the MasterCard Foundation. It featured Scott Isbrandt from Education Development Center talking about PAJE-Nieta and the Stepping Stone mobile content authoring platform (video) and Jonathan McKay from Praekelt Foundation talking about: the Ummeli job portal.

  • PAJE-Nieta is aimed at increasing literacy and entrepreneurship skills among 14-25 year olds in small rural villages with few services. The hope is that by increasing those skills, the youth can access market information systems which can then lead to enhanced livelihoods. Scott noted that local youth may produce, but they run into difficulties when it comes to knowing where to sell. There is a database of information available, but it is not accessible unless a person is literate. The challenge is taking the wealth of what has been done with ICTs to places with no electricity and no connectivity, and making it affordable and accessible. EDC determined which handsets were widely available, cheapest, run on Java, could run simple multimedia,had a speaker, and were within the purchasing power range of youth. Then they built Stepping Stone for this model so that teachers could create and push out local content. Stepping Stone includes digital text books, learning assessments, direct feedback capability and an interactive audio that is pre-loaded onto phones. A concern is what happens when the grant is over, so EDC is looking at ways to work with kiosks, pre-loading content on micro SD cards, and thinking about membership fees as something that would enable people to continue to load additional content. Stepping Stone will be released as an open source platform so that others can use it.
  • Ummeli is a mobile platform created because youth who participate in Praekelt’s Young Africa Live initiative expressed that finding meaningful work was a higher priority even than HIV prevention.  Praekelt worked with Vodacom to ensure that there would be no cost, because youth, in marginalized and/or rural communities normally cannot cover data charges. Ummeli has a CV builder that youth can fill out and fax to a potential employer for free. They can also fill out surveys that gain them points that they can use to cover the cost of faxes. Ummeli was designed specifically for mobile and as a community rather than as an individual tool. It is the first purely mobile job platform in South Africa. Rather than only listing job opportunities, Ummeli enables users to create their own opportunities and has extensive supplemental support such as career advice, life skills and peer networking. Youth can geocode or do other small microtasks to earn points that they can use in the Ummeli system. Rather than only looking at ‘finding employment’, Ummeli is set up to help youth find ‘meaningful work.’ This can be in their communities, volunteering or interning, all of which give youth experience, help them make contacts, and help them build their resumes. Ummeli hopes to turn depression into action by positioning youth’s free time as an asset that can be used for positive things like helping their communities. Ummeli is looking at taking existing course work and enhancing it for low-end handsets; they are looking at how to get around the verification and accreditation issue so that these opportunities will be seen as credible. Ummeli currently has 87,000 unique users.

Session 3 was facilitated by Suzanne Philion (U.S. Dept. of State) and looked at mYWD: Mobiles for Youth Skills Development. Speakers were Michael Carrier (British Council) on “Using mobile devices to strengthen educational systems, specifically in English for Basic Education and supporting workforce readiness;” Bhanu Potta from Nokia on “Nokia Life Education services – mLearning at scale of millions;” and Shayan Mashatian from Appexiom – Petanque, with A demonstration of a mobile learning pilot and findings from its implementation.

  • The British Council’s Learn English Apps focus on applications that can help youth to learn English via mobile to increase their chances to obtain employment.  One point that Michael brought up was that people can use their short bits of downtime to learn English on their phone rather than go on a cigarette break or check their Facebook. The Council’s programs are available on different devices from iPhone, Nokia, Samsung, Ovi and the Android OS. Apps include podcasts, a soap opera, pronunciation exercises and games to improve grammar and vocabulary
  • Nokia Life provides education, youth empowerment and lifelong learning; health, agriculture and entertainment services. Nokia has developed software that makes a very cheap mobile look more like a data-enabled phone because, as Bhanu noted, all levels of consumers wish to have a data-like experience. This includes a dynamic home screen with a rotating menu for high discoverability, integration with voices services, a dynamic inbox that highlights new content, and new content channels that can be added using just SMS. Social elements available include ‘ask an expert’, share, and ‘respond to polls’. Nokia Life is currently available in India, Indonesia, China, Nigeria and some additional countries in Middle East and Africa. Nokia Life will provide curated content rather than offer access to all the information available on the Internet via Google. Nokia Browser, a cloud based service will make this information easier to access by compressing the information by 85% making it 3 times faster to download and much cheaper for people to access.
  • Appexiom-Petanque allows for educational content creation via a simple set-up where creators can drop in content, making it easy to publish. This helps overcome some of the current failures of distance learning and addresses the need to see learning differently. Rather than try to put textbooks onto a phone, Sayan commented, m-Learning needs to be re-organized, re-formatted and re-engineered for the mobile phone. It needs to focus on the user experience and provide interactive content, allowing people to choose, multi-task and integrate social media.

Session 4. The final mYWD session shared some initial findings from the mYWD Landscape Study (in process) and looked at setting the foundations of the mYWD Working Group, brainstorming some priorities and topics for the group to tackle, and discussing what makes for a successful community of practice or working group. From this session came the idea for the October 15 Learning Series event on Innovations in mYWD. If you’d like to attend, either let me know or RSVP directly to MFrench at JBSInternational dot com.

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Highlights of the Open Development stream at OK Festival

Posted in development, ICTs, mobile and technology, m4D, open development, open government, open knowledge, participation, politics, smart aid, social media, transparency, wait... what?, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 24, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I’m just home after a week at the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki (and wishing I could have cloned myself and attended each of the 13 streams!):

Here’s a video summary of some of the highlights of the Open Development stream.

Thanks so much to everyone who organized, supported, funded and attended the sessions!

Also see:

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Tweaking: SMS violence reporting system in Benin

Posted in Benin, children, development, ICT4D, ICTs, mobile and technology, m4D, mapping, protection, VAC, youth, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 24, 2010| 6 Comments »

Henri from Plan Benin training on SMS reporting.

In February I was in Benin to support staff to pilot the idea of using SMS reporting (FrontlineSMS) and digital mapping (Ushahidi) to strengthen local and national systems for reporting, tracking and responding to violence against children.  We conducted 2 workshops in mid-February with youth leaders, frontline staff, community members, local authorities from the Center for Social Protection (CPS) and representatives from the Ministry of the Family to get things started.

For some more background, check out my previous posts on the Violence against Children (VAC) project, the questions we asked ourselves before getting started on the SMS and mapping initiative, and the February workshops in Benin and what we learned there.

Since February, staff in Benin have been following up with workshop participants and with local authorities and institutions, including: the Prefect, the Mayors, community supervisors, animators of the children’s/youth media clubs, headmasters and other school authorities and the CPS.  The youth in one community did a radio program about violence against children and talked about SMS reporting. They also designed an information sheet that’s been hung up all over the town to encourage the population to report cases of violence.

Henri, Plan Benin’s ICT Director who facilitated at the Benin workshops, went to Togo to replicate the training with staff and youth there.  He and Carmen, who manages the overall VAC project in Benin, have also been observing and collecting feedback on the system to see where it needs tweaking.  They have put a project plan together for the next 6 months or so.

Carmen the VAC project coordinator in Benin.

Observations that Henri and Carmen shared and some thoughts we have about resolving them:

Issue:

  • Most people call instead of sending SMS

Hmmm….

  • Why?  Habit?  Literacy?  Unclear indications of what to do or unclear expectations of what the system is for?  We need to find out more about this.  It would be good to know exactly what kind of volume we are talking about total in terms of SMS vs calls. (I will update this post when I find out.)
  • Should we start taking calls too then? And are there resources and capacity to manage calls in addition to FrontlineSMS (which is automated)? How are we linking with the Child Help Line in Benin?
  • Could both calls and SMS be administered in the Ushahidi system?  Eg., Just as an administrator needs to review any SMS’s that come into Ushahidi  before approving them, someone could be tasked with inputting information from a phone call into the Ushahidi back end to then trigger the rest of the process (verification, response, etc). And how would that impact on pulling data out of the system for decision making?  (See this post for more information on how the system is currently conceived)

Issue:

  • Some people are sending a re-call SMS (asking us to return the call)

Hmmm….

  • We need to find out why people are sending re-call messages instead of SMS’s.  Because in the current set-up, text messages are not free?  Literacy issues? Because our system looks like something else they’ve done where re-call was the norm?  Something else?
  • If it’s due to low literacy or language issues, how can we open the system to those who cannot read/write or who do not use French?
  • Plan Benin is discussing with the GSM provider to find a way to send back an automatic reply SMS informing people not to call but to send a message, and to take this opportunity to indicate in the message what is expected as information.  But if literacy/language is the issue, we will not have solved anything by doing this…. Sounds like we really need to make sure calling is an option, and that good integration with the national Child Help Line is a real priority.
  • Plan Benin is also negotiating getting a “green line” or free short code, so that might resolve part of this.

Issue:

  • Many people are not using the key word ‘HALTE’ (stop) at the beginning of the message, meaning that the commands don’t trigger the messages to automatically send the information to Ushahidi.  (In the current system, each SMS should include the key word ‘HALTE’.  This key word triggers a “thanks for your message” automatic response from FrontlineSMS, and the forwarding of the message to the Ushahidi back end for subsequent management and follow up by local authorities.)

Hmmm….

  • Staff noticed that most (but not all) of the messages without the key word ‘’HALTE’’ contained the word ‘enfant’ (child). Henri has added ‘enfant’ as a key word in addition to ‘HALTE’ — and says it is working fine.  So we will assess if this helps.
  • Another alternative would be to not use any keywords – we will need to look into whether we can set FrontlineSMS up so that any SMS that goes to that number gets auto forwarded to Ushahidi.

Early draft of a poster promoting violence reporting by SMS

Issue:

  • Most of the messages are too vague to find the place and the victim for responding (and people do not have GPS enabled phones).  We have suggested that an SMS report should contain certain information [HALTE+type of violence+where it’s happening (eg., school, home, etc)+village name+district+age+sex+name of child if known], but people don’t follow the suggested format.

Hmmm….

  • How can we simplify it or better explain the type of information that’s needed?  Something we need to dig deeper into and consult with users to figure out.  Carmen’s take is that we are at the beginning of the process and we need to be patient and sensitize a lot so that people get used to the idea and understand how things work.

Issue:

  • Compatible FLSMS phones and modems are very difficult to find.  We were only able to find one phone that was compatible in Benin (a used one) because newer phone models are not compatible and the modems we found refused to connect.

Hmmm….

  • We really need to get this resolved since the entire system in Benin rests on one phone. What if it stops working?  It’s really difficult to expand the project without a larger set of phone/modem options.  We’ll work with the FrontlineSMS forum or staff (both are always super helpful on this kind of thing) in the next couple weeks to figure out how to resolve the compatibility issues, because there are modems available in West Africa that should be compatible, but that we couldn’t get to function.

Issue:

  • We planned for community response teams to be able to subscribe to alerts on Ushahidi, so that when there is an incident reported in the zone where they work, they would be alerted by SMS and could set the follow up process in motion.  But we haven’t been able to get the alerts working on Ushahidi or set up email reporting there.

Hmmm….

  • We discussed with the Ushahidi team and the problem was that not all the strings of code in Ushahidi had been translated into French yet.  Thanks to @theresac and @penelopeinparis, who volunteered to translate a load of strings, we are getting everything into French, and Henry at Ushahidi is helping get alerts working.  We still need to finalize all the elements on our Ushahidi page however and get everything working.  We’d also like to customize our Ushahidi page to make it our own, similar to the customizing that Voices of Kibera has done with their Ushahidi instance.

Any additional thoughts or help on the above issues are most welcome!


As for next steps, Henri and Carmen shared their plans:

  • Present the system to political and administrative authorities, including: head of the Brigade for the Protection of Minors, juvenile judges, Ministry of the Family’s Director for Children and Adolescents, Director of Family Programs, Minister of ICTs, cabinet and authorities who regulate telecommunications, Ministry of the Interior and Public Security, National Assembly, mayors and prefects, schools and teacher-parent committees, community authorities, media
  • Train staff, government partners, school and parent committees, and local NGOs on the reporting system, including a 1-day workshop with all Plan staff and a 1 day workshop with local NGO partners, schools and government staff
  • Accompany child protection committees and organized youth groups to use the system.  This will be done by holding sessions with organized children and youth groups at village level to reinforce and raise awareness on the reporting system; training child protection committees to use the new reporting system; holding one day sessions each month with the village level child protection system staff to discuss follow up on reports that have come in, and installing FrontlineSMS in each local site and adding local focal points as Ushahidi administrators
  • Strengthen awareness in the public and with leaders to support violence reporting by developing a communications plan to generate awareness on the issue of violence, the importance of reporting, and the mechanisms to report via SMS; supporting youth to use arts and theater to raise awareness on the issue of violence against children; talking with religious leaders and village chiefs; creating television, radio, newspaper and web advertisements to reach the general public and decision makers
  • Secure a free short code (target:  by May)
  • Conduct a national level evaluation workshop with involved local and national actors (in 6 months)

As we move forward, more questions will surely come up and we’ll need to continually tweak things. But I feel that we’re off to a good start. The fact that people are calling in and SMS’ing in is a good sign already that the program has some potential, and that people are willing to report violence against children.

—————-

Related posts on Wait… What?

Breaking it down: violence against children

Fostering a new political consciousness on violence against children

Seven (or more) questions to ask before adding ICTs

Finding some ICT answers in Benin

Meeting in the middle

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