The Jokko Initiative: Teaching SMS to Low-Literacy Communities in Senegal
9 views
Skip to first unread message
Rowena Luk
Jan 4, 2010, 4:28:33 PM1/4/10
to ict...@googlegroups.com
Greetings!
Welcome back to ICT4CHW 2010; hope everyone had a restful and rejuvenating break. You’ll forgive me for being a little quiet on this list over the past few months; it’s difficult to keep on top of everything while dealing with the ups and downs of internet in the field. I’m in Kenya now, though, so we’ll see if this underwater cable business is everything it’s cracked up to be.
Before I begin, a confession: the project I’m going to talk about today isn’t really a CHW project, although we do have several CHWs in our user group. However, I’m going to highlight specific points which I think will be relevant to this community, particularly with respect to establishing good training programs. This project is called The Jokko Initiative, and it’s a project of Tostan International, in collaboration with UNICEF, in Senegal, West Africa. Its focus is on promoting local-language literacy and social mobilisation through the use of individual and group text messaging.
To understand what makes The Jokko Initiative relevant for us, we need to start by understanding a bit about the organization itself. Tostan was founded in Senegal 20 years ago with a focus on literacy, but its history is full of ‘big picture’ thinking. While working in literacy, Tostan quickly realized that education was impossible without health, so they took on health. Then they realized that health was strongly influenced by culture, and started taking on controversial issues such as child marriage and FGM. That led to their work in human rights, and then democracy, until finally nowadays Tostan is one of the most holistic, far-reaching, and effective social change organizations in West Africa.
Among other NGOs in this region, Tostan is also well known for its focus on leveraging local knowledge and local staff. Many Tostan supervisors start out as Tostan facilitators, and many facilitators start out as participants in the non-formal educational programs Tostan runs. In this way, it provides unique opportunities throughout the organization for those who have proven their impact in the communities, even if they never had the chance to benefit from formal schooling. Even in this project, you can see Tostan’s emphasis on respecting and working with the target communities: for the 3 villages where the prototype was piloted over the first few months of this project, Tostan had 2 full-time, local-language staff on the field assessing the uptake and providing rich feedback to headquarters. In the second phase of this project, on the insistence of those 2 staff members, each participating village will select 2 ‘relais’: hard-working, literate members of the community who will be charged with ‘multiplying’ the message and providing a kind of low-tech tech support.
But that’s enough backgrounder, I think; you can see already Tostan’s holistic approach to development and its collaborative approach to social change. One of the things which has been most interesting to me during my time with this project is how much the training has changed as it was handed off from foreign, international staff to regional and local staff. Of course there are a thousand small things: the wake-up dance in the morning; a focus on ‘questions and answers’ over lectures; reinforcing the daily trainings through additional media like radio broadcasts, etc. However, if there was one thing that I would want you to take away from this post, it’s the idea of presenting technology in context: that teaching these tools is as much about the why and the when as it is how.
For example, the first time we went to the village with a prototype, we naturally spent 80% of the time walking through the technology. This is RapidSMS. This is how you register in our system via SMS. This is how you broadcast a text message to the community. Now, 6 months later, the actual ‘tech’ part of our training has fallen to maybe 40% of the time. The majority of the conversation is now focused on providing the mental context to really understand and motivate proper usage of the system. SMS isn’t just a cheaper, more reliable substitute for a phone call; participants discuss and decide together how best to use this to promote better sanitation or make announcements or facilitate mosquito net distributions.
Another way in which these trainings build up a better context with which to understand SMS is through their focus on a variety of communication tools. The training doesn’t present SMS in isolation. Rather, we spent a good 2 hours of a 2-day training brainstorming all the different modes of long-distance communication: everything from inter-village drumming to messenger bike. The communities themselves go through the exercise of identifying pros and cons for each, as well as appropriate use cases. In this way they can situate SMS properly within their arsenal of social mobilization tools, instead of blindly firing one off when a signpost (or a marching band!) would be more appropriate.
Finally, the third way in which Tostan is building up a rich context around SMS is by integrating this training directly into their literacy and other non-formal education programs. The Jokko sessions now are still presented in discrete, 2-day workshops; however, with time the goal is to integrate this training piecemeal into the literacy training program, so that as villagers learn to read they can immediately start to make sense of local-language text messages. As they start to write, they can also learn how to send messages themselves. And as they start organizing social, health, and educational events, they will be empowered with tools which will allow them to spread the word across their village, their region, and even their country.
Not all of these lessons will be directly applicable to the various projects you all are undertaking. (I suspect the importance of presenting technology in context is particularly great when working with lower-literate communities with less exposure to and innate understanding of technology.) Still, the following are interesting themes for us to be thinking about, particularly if we are trying to flesh out engaging and memorable training programs:
* Allowing users to understand why, not just how
* Making sure they understand when to use a technology, and when to use more traditional means
* Situating tools cohesively within existing training curricula
Hope this is helpful. Thanks for reading!
Welcome back to ICT4CHW 2010; hope everyone had a restful and rejuvenating break. You’ll forgive me for being a little quiet on this list over the past few months; it’s difficult to keep on top of everything while dealing with the ups and downs of internet in the field. I’m in Kenya now, though, so we’ll see if this underwater cable business is everything it’s cracked up to be.
Before I begin, a confession: the project I’m going to talk about today isn’t really a CHW project, although we do have several CHWs in our user group. However, I’m going to highlight specific points which I think will be relevant to this community, particularly with respect to establishing good training programs. This project is called The Jokko Initiative, and it’s a project of Tostan International, in collaboration with UNICEF, in Senegal, West Africa. Its focus is on promoting local-language literacy and social mobilisation through the use of individual and group text messaging.
To understand what makes The Jokko Initiative relevant for us, we need to start by understanding a bit about the organization itself. Tostan was founded in Senegal 20 years ago with a focus on literacy, but its history is full of ‘big picture’ thinking. While working in literacy, Tostan quickly realized that education was impossible without health, so they took on health. Then they realized that health was strongly influenced by culture, and started taking on controversial issues such as child marriage and FGM. That led to their work in human rights, and then democracy, until finally nowadays Tostan is one of the most holistic, far-reaching, and effective social change organizations in West Africa.
Among other NGOs in this region, Tostan is also well known for its focus on leveraging local knowledge and local staff. Many Tostan supervisors start out as Tostan facilitators, and many facilitators start out as participants in the non-formal educational programs Tostan runs. In this way, it provides unique opportunities throughout the organization for those who have proven their impact in the communities, even if they never had the chance to benefit from formal schooling. Even in this project, you can see Tostan’s emphasis on respecting and working with the target communities: for the 3 villages where the prototype was piloted over the first few months of this project, Tostan had 2 full-time, local-language staff on the field assessing the uptake and providing rich feedback to headquarters. In the second phase of this project, on the insistence of those 2 staff members, each participating village will select 2 ‘relais’: hard-working, literate members of the community who will be charged with ‘multiplying’ the message and providing a kind of low-tech tech support.
But that’s enough backgrounder, I think; you can see already Tostan’s holistic approach to development and its collaborative approach to social change. One of the things which has been most interesting to me during my time with this project is how much the training has changed as it was handed off from foreign, international staff to regional and local staff. Of course there are a thousand small things: the wake-up dance in the morning; a focus on ‘questions and answers’ over lectures; reinforcing the daily trainings through additional media like radio broadcasts, etc. However, if there was one thing that I would want you to take away from this post, it’s the idea of presenting technology in context: that teaching these tools is as much about the why and the when as it is how.
For example, the first time we went to the village with a prototype, we naturally spent 80% of the time walking through the technology. This is RapidSMS. This is how you register in our system via SMS. This is how you broadcast a text message to the community. Now, 6 months later, the actual ‘tech’ part of our training has fallen to maybe 40% of the time. The majority of the conversation is now focused on providing the mental context to really understand and motivate proper usage of the system. SMS isn’t just a cheaper, more reliable substitute for a phone call; participants discuss and decide together how best to use this to promote better sanitation or make announcements or facilitate mosquito net distributions.
Another way in which these trainings build up a better context with which to understand SMS is through their focus on a variety of communication tools. The training doesn’t present SMS in isolation. Rather, we spent a good 2 hours of a 2-day training brainstorming all the different modes of long-distance communication: everything from inter-village drumming to messenger bike. The communities themselves go through the exercise of identifying pros and cons for each, as well as appropriate use cases. In this way they can situate SMS properly within their arsenal of social mobilization tools, instead of blindly firing one off when a signpost (or a marching band!) would be more appropriate.
Finally, the third way in which Tostan is building up a rich context around SMS is by integrating this training directly into their literacy and other non-formal education programs. The Jokko sessions now are still presented in discrete, 2-day workshops; however, with time the goal is to integrate this training piecemeal into the literacy training program, so that as villagers learn to read they can immediately start to make sense of local-language text messages. As they start to write, they can also learn how to send messages themselves. And as they start organizing social, health, and educational events, they will be empowered with tools which will allow them to spread the word across their village, their region, and even their country.
Not all of these lessons will be directly applicable to the various projects you all are undertaking. (I suspect the importance of presenting technology in context is particularly great when working with lower-literate communities with less exposure to and innate understanding of technology.) Still, the following are interesting themes for us to be thinking about, particularly if we are trying to flesh out engaging and memorable training programs:
* Allowing users to understand why, not just how
* Making sure they understand when to use a technology, and when to use more traditional means
* Situating tools cohesively within existing training curricula
Hope this is helpful. Thanks for reading!
Peace,
Rowena
Rowena
neal lesh
Jan 6, 2010, 12:36:21 AM1/6/10
to ict4chw
Hi Rowena,
Thanks for kicking things off in 2010 for us with another excellent post that further expands our horizons. It's refreshing to hear about an organization with such vision that was here long before 'mHealth' became popular and no doubt will continue to utilize whatever technology is useful even if its popularity fades.
Along these lines, I'd be curious to hear how Tostan will assess the success of the Jokko Initiative as it sounds like they are not at all invested in the technology for it's own sake.
And it would be interesting to learn a bit more about the prototype you all are working on. On the face of it, text messaging and low-literacy does not to me seem like a natural combination. Is using SMS messages meant to accelerate literacy learning or if the goal is teach text messaging in addition to traditional literacy? Are text messages being used to reach low-literate populations as well as enabling low-literate users to communicate more effectively?
Is a great point you make about the need for us to adapt our approaches when working with low-literate users. My sense is that literacy gives people much more practice at abstract thinking and it can be hard for many of us to relate to what it's like not to think that way. I'd welcome any further thoughts from anybody on this list on how to adapt our technologies or training to low-literate users. Can we perhaps build elements into our user interfaces to help reinforce the 'why' of these systems or to make training easier? Conversely, are there some ways we can design our interfaces to help improve the literacy of the users?
Finally, as somebody who has worked on many ictd projects in many parts of the world, I wonder if you have thoughts on how one might combine something like the Jokko Initiative with other ict4chw projects. Would it work well to introduce them simultaneously with the same users and/or in the same communities? Are these best thought of as separate interventions or could they reinforce each other?
As always, no need to reply to all that...just pick out the bits that make sense...
Take care,
neal
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ict4chw" group.
To post to this group, send email to ict...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to ict4chw+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/ict4chw?hl=en.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages