Carlin Carr, Mumbai Community Manager
Photo: Ken Banks, kiwanja.net
There has likely been no greater generational divider than the advent of technology. Across the world, youth populations are being brought up with access to technology that was not available to previous generations. This phenomenon has reached the developing world as well, where new devices are becoming smarter, sharper and, importantly, more affordable. Unlike their parents and grandparents, youth in places like India can access a vast new world with mobile technology, and a vast new world can also access them. The result is that more poverty-alleviation initiatives have focused on catering to youth with innovative uses of technology, particularly focused around education and training initiatives.
Learning on the go
For the poor, education has often taken a backseat to survival. In Maharashtra, Mumbai’s home state, literacy rates have improved over the last couple of decades in urban areas. So, too, have primary school attendance rates: Mumbai’s elementary school children are nearly all (97 percent) enrolled in a public or private institution. However, that number drops significantly for secondary school. While children in India legally cannot work before the age of 14, many start laboring much younger than that. School-aged children work as delivery boys, sweeping floors, stocking shelves and other menial tasks; employment and the need to add to the family income, not surprisingly, coincide with the time when drop-out rates rise. Many children are forced to choose this path over education.
For older generations, this early employment path was the end of their formal schooling; yet, for the technologically connected children, new ways of continuing to learn and expand skills sets are being introduced. Since handheld devices are becoming increasingly main stream among urban poor youth, this population is gaining access to more and better learning opportunities through their phones. The “classroom” is finally opening up to meet the needs of the poor. While night schools are one option, mobile learning is gaining ground as well. The traditional physical classroom that previous generations needed to attend is now more flexible, mobile and accessible to a population with varying constraints. While a public policy focus on improving access to the public school system (as well as improving the system itself), a simultaneous introduction of alternative learning arenas will only benefit these vulnerable populations.
The ubiquity of mobile phones
One of the first major purchases today’s urban youth makes is a mobile phone. Computers are still unaffordable to most families in slums, so the Internet is accessed through phones. The investment’s purpose is initially to stay connected with friends and family, but as a study by Microsoft found, there is potential for other, perhaps more important, uses. The report conducted earlier this year, Anthropology, Development and ICTs: Slums, Youth and the Mobile Internet in Urban India, investigated mobile internet adoption among teenagers in a low-income urban setting. The goal was to understand better how mobile phones are being used by this generation and how the results may be relevant for development research.
The study found that youth in India’s slums are using their mobile phones largely for entertainment purposes — games, music, videos. While this usage seems far from educational and other development initiative intentions, the study says that using mobiles for entertainment is an important start to “drawing people into the digital world.” This research is important for e-learning initiatives, since making learning interesting, fun and approachable should be primary concerns. The study says that “while internet use may eventually expand to include other (instrumental) uses, entertainment remains the hook for initial access and recurrent use.”
24/7 learning
Given this valuable information, it becomes apparent that successful programs need to enhance accessibility and affordability, but they also need to integrate a “deep sense of play, self-exploration and learning.” One of these platforms available to urban youth is the “Mobile Learning Solution,” a socially-inclusive development program founded by the NIIT Foundation that aims to upgrade the skill base and employability of marginalized youth living in the urban slums and even some rural areas.
Mobile Learning Solution seeks to create a “24/7 habit of learning,” allowing users to access information at their own convenience. The initiative seeks to upgrade the skills of youth ages 17-25 who would otherwise enter the informal sector, perhaps following the traditional employment of their parent or grandparent. “With an effort to resolve the issue of employability in slum areas, the vision of the project is to provide employability skills to the urban slum youth … using their mobile handsets,” says an article on mBillionth’s award page. Mobile Learning Solution offers English language content applications that can be uploaded to mobile phones, mostly for free. The courseware “encourages students to practice English and learn on their own, outside of the classroom environment, inculcates learning, enhances vocabulary through a self-quizzing mechanism and practices pronunciation with the audio-video word-list and Hindi-English dictionary.”
While primary school students attend at better rates than secondary school students, the public school system at all levels is failing its students. In Mumbai, 40-50 percent of elementary school-aged children cannot read or write. Mobile-learning initiatives can, therefore, also be used to enhance the experience of students in under-served school systems and expand access to learning. Initiatives have started to target younger children as well, shifting from mobile phones as entertainment to a classroom at an early age. In partnership with Sesame Workshop India, Groupshot, a US-based design and development group which creates technology for informality, is creating mobile phone-based education tools for slum youth in India. “Revolving around the concept of the cellphone as a shared social and educational device, children will be able to engage their immediate community and environment as a living laboratory in which they will collaboratively learn through play and exploration.” New opportunities and strategies for engaging students can employ technology to support those without consistent access to education as well as supplement traditional education systems.
What this means for the “generation gap”
Breaking the cycle of poverty that has persisted for decades in most families will take great innovation and collaboration. At the core of what will launch this break is expanding educational opportunities. Given the economic constraints of the poor in India’s slums, it is difficult to see how the traditional education system can, as it currently operates, meet the needs of the complicated situations of these children. And while developing the public system should remain the state’s primary concern, technology has the potential to extend the classroom experience to a generation of mobile-connected learners in ways previous generations could never have imagined.
Like any self-learning initiatives, the key will be to make the programs interesting, convenient, affordable and easy to follow. As the Microsoft study showed, phones are already in constant use. Development initiatives can fuse current uses with innovative and effective content. If this blend happens, technology will have the potential to be adopted for a wide variety of causes — from teaching farmers to sow their fields properly to giving new mothers essential information for feeding their newborns to enhancing skills in a virtual world full of trades that can be transferred to the real world, and make a real impact.