The world’s first satellite-enabled interactive distance learning project is enabling refugee children in Ghana to continue with their education

We tend to think of refugee camps as temporary structures, but most of us fail to realize that many people live in them for several years. This presents serious challenges, specially for children who face serious danger of falling behind with their schooling or dropping out of education altogether as it can be very difficult to get qualified teachers to reach the camps on a regular basis.

But now technology is bringing a cost-effective and viable solution to that problem, in a pilot project recently trialled at the Ampain Refugee Camp in Western Ghana. The camp was established back in 2011 to shelter displaced Ivoirians fleeing the hostilities following the November 2010 Côte d’Ivoire Presidential elections. It is currently home to over 3,000 people, including around 225 school-age children who go to the Ampain Primary school established within the camp.

The Varkey Foundation Teach to Reach Remote Classrooms Project is the first of its kind
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The Varkey Foundation Teach to Reach Remote Classrooms Project (TRC) funded by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is the world’s first satellite enabled live two-way interactive distance learning programme for children living in a refugee camp. Each classroom in the school is equipped with a projector and a low-cost durable computer to receive lessons via a solar-powered satellite link. Since April, the foundation has been running interactive distance lessons from qualified teachers based at its studio in Accra to support the children in the camp with their learning.

While technologies such as Skype have been used for distance learning solutions in the past, but this is the first live, interactive two-way satellite enabled project to reach refugee children in sub-Saharan Africa
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The goal of the Ampaign project is to prove that the concept works in an emergency situation to increase children’s school attendance
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According to Vikas Pota, CEO of the Varkey Foundation, the goal of the Ampaign project is to prove that the concept works in an emergency situation to increase children’s school attendance and build opportunities for teachers and community members that directly impact learning for pupils.

“This project can make a real difference because it is quick to mobilize and can be scaled up, delivering lessons to more refugee settings around the globe. Most importantly, it is a long-lasting solution which is what is required due to the length of time that children often end up staying in refugee camps,” he says.

While technologies such as Skype have been used for distance learning solutions in the past, but this is the first live, interactive two-way satellite enabled project to reach refugee children in sub-Saharan Africa. The Ampain primary school has been fitted with a satellite dish, which, through solar powered technology, receives a live link to highly qualified teachers in a studio in Accra who broadcast lessons direct to the refugee camp. Each classroom has a projector so all the children can see the teacher giving the lessons, and each classroom has also been provided with a computer so that children can interact with the teacher in a direct, live, two-way link.

This project can make a real difference because it is quick to mobilize and can be scaled up
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This allows the refugee children – who are currently out of school and at risk of dropping out of education – to not only catch up with their basic education through literacy and numeracy lessons, but also learn the language of their host country, which is crucial for integration.

Ms. Ioli Kimyaci, UNHCR Ghana Country Representative says that this is a cost-effective way to enable children who otherwise would have been denied a quality education to have access to qualified teachers. “The beauty of this project is that it allows one good teacher’s reach to extend anywhere with the use of satellite technology, solar powered computer hardware and an interactive live feed inside the classroom,” she says.

The program also offers after-school sessions for both boys and girls to address gender specific issues and life skills, helping to create a safe environment that empowers pupils with leadership and decision-making skills.

The Teach to Reach program is based on the successful Making Ghanaian Girls Great! project
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The “Wonder Women” after-school program, for example, teaches young girls about reproductive health, preventing early pregnancy, human rights awareness and financial literacy. It also emphasizes leadership skills that develop girls’ ability to advocate for themselves, interact with leaders in their community and stand up for issues important to them. The goal is to raise their self esteem and empower them to stay in school and reach their full potential.

Boys also learn these core skills to support them with specific challenges they face and encourage them to continue in their schooling, while also tackling harmful gender stereotypes through discussion and role-play, showing boys how a change in their behavior can help their sisters and female peers, and therefore their entire communities.

“Every child deserves an education, but refugees in particular are more often than not denied this right. According to UNESCO, refugees are five times more likely to be out of school than the global average. More than half of the 6m school-age children under UNESCO’s mandate have no school to go to, with some 1.75m refugee children not in primary school and 1.95m refugee adolescents not in secondary school,” says Leonora Dowley, Ghana Country Director at the Varkey Foundation. “What makes this project so exciting is that gives refugee children access to high quality teachers and does so extremely cost-effectively – we can reach more than 200 children who otherwise would not be getting any education at low cost but with significant results.”

The Teach to Reach program is based on the successful Making Ghanaian Girls Great! project (known as MGCubed), aimed at enhancing the quality of education for more than 10,000 marginalized children in Ghana since it was established in 2014. The Varkey Foundation is part of the #WithRefugees Coalition who are supporting the #WithRefugees campaign, a group of more than 100 universities, FBOs, youth groups, UN Agencies, and NGOs working with UNHCR to promote tolerance and respect for persons forced to flee. It also founded the Global Teacher Prize to shine a spotlight on the incredible work teachers do all over the world.

“Nothing beats having access to a great teacher who can add important context, stimulate discussion among children to help them truly grasp what they’re learning and broaden young minds,” says Dowley. “We believe it’s a highly replicable solution that could be deployed in other settings, and given the extent of the refugee crisis it will be exciting to see how things could develop on this front in future,” concludes Dowley.

This article was originally published on IDG Connect

How technology is helping education reach refugee children, by @alicebonasio from @CIOonline https://t.co/9UgA59FCJA

— Technology Experts (@IDGCN) June 27, 2017

For companies looking to gain a competitive edge through technology, Tech Trends offers strategic Virtual Reality and Digital Transformation Consultancy services tailored to your brand.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Technology Beaming Hope to Refugees appeared first on Tech Trends.

The world is in desperate need of more qualified, motivated, and empowered teachers, as education is the key to achieving global development goals. How can tech help achieve this?

Here’s one statistic that’s hard to wrap your head around: In order for every child to receive a primary education by 2030, we need to recruit and train 25.8 million school teachers. To put this into some perspective, that’s the equivalent of recruiting and training over one third of the entire population of the United Kingdom, and to do so across some of the most poorest and most remote areas of the planet.

We need to use technology to help bridge the logistics gap where it comes to teacher training
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The solution, some argue, is to leverage technology to bridge that logistics gap and stretch existing resources to meet the demand.

Yet although this might seem like an impossibly ambitious goal, there is no shortage of passionate individuals willing to join the teaching workforce. The crucial obstacle, however, is the chronic lack of training capacity to empower those individuals to teach.

Demand for teachers in sub-Saharan Africa will grow by over 50 percent in the next decade
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This problem is most evident in sub-Saharan Africa. The region currently needs 2.7 million teachers and with a fast-growing school-age population this demand will grow by nearly 50 percent in the next decade or so. The Ghanaian Ministry of Education estimates that around 63,000 of the country’s primary school teachers and a further 31,000 secondary school teachers remain untrained.

As the number of primary school teachers in Ghana rose sharply by 61 percent over the last decade according to UNESCO the available training resources simply could not keep up and schools were forced to hire teachers with little or no training. This meant that the percentage of trained teachers fell from 72 percent to 53 percent from 1999 to 2013.

That trend is only set to increase as the demand for teaching soars. To meet its agreed Sustainable Development Goals of providing every child with 12 years of quality education by 2030, Ghana needs a further 189,000 teachers, in addition to training existing ones.

Ghana needs 189,000 teachers in addition to training existing ones.
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The lack of resources and the challenges of reaching teachers in remote and geographically dispersed areas makes this a daunting task, all but impossible to achieve using traditional training methodologies, which are time-and-labor intensive by nature.

The solution is to leverage technology to bridge that logistics gap and stretch existing resources to meet the demand. And this is precisely what a project called Train for Tomorrow, which was launched by the The Varkey Foundation  earlier this year, aims to do.

Train for tomorrow is Africa’s first interactive distance learning program aimed specifically at teachers. It works by enabling two-way interactions between trainers and teachers in geographically remote and dispersed locations, meaning they can be reached at a much lower cost. Over the next two years it will use the $2 million grant it received from Dubai Cares to train around 5,000 teachers in Ghana.

Train for tomorrow is Africa’s first interactive distance learning program
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The project was inspired by an earlier initiative called Making Ghanaian Girls Great (also known as MGCubed) which successfully used solar-powered computers and projectors to broadcast live lessons by master teachers to schools in deprived and isolated areas.  Funded by the UK Department for International Development, MGCubed taught basic numeracy and literacy to over 8,000 boys and girls, and also provided additional after-school club activities to vulnerable girls on issues around early pregnancy, early marriage, girls’ rights, and financial literacy. The results showed improved maths scores across the board as well as significant attendance increase from 54 percent to 80 percent in less than two years.

TFT was inspired by an earlier initiative called Making Ghanaian Girls Great - also known as MGCubed
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What this shows is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel where it comes to using edtech to impact global development. The collaboration and viral spread of content that the internet facilitates is most evident in social media, but it goes far beyond cat memes and clever quizzes. The same technology can be used to create simple and effective solutions, which can be leveraged at relatively low cost to reach a large number of people. And the greatest impact is undoubtedly to be found in empowering teachers, since the ripple effects of knowledge distribution are rapidly multiplied as each trainee is empowered to better teach many children in turn.

Each trained teacher is empowered to change the lives of many children
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The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”; enabling every child in the world to access education would indeed be something magical, but it’s also not beyond the realm of reason. The most exciting thing about using technology in education is that, once a concept has been successfully tested, it can usually be scaled at relatively low cost. That’s why projects like Train for Tomorrow are worth watching, because if they can train 5,000 teachers across Ghana in the next two years, it is not actually that large a leap to imagine that similar initiatives could reach the 2.7 million teachers needed across sub-Saharan Africa, or indeed the 25 million around the world. We will be watching with interest.

enabling every child in the world to access education would indeed be something magical
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This article was originally published on EdTech Digest

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Can We Use Technology to Train 25 Million New Teachers? appeared first on Tech Trends.