Enable Education and Waliku: The use of technology in education system strengthening in low resource settings

• In Event: Transforming Education Through Technology: Save the Children's Growing Portfolio of EdTech Programming and Evidence of Impact

Proposal

Teacher knowledge and classroom practice continues to be an ongoing challenge to improving the quality of learning for children in developing countries. Save the Children has taken a number of novel approaches to address this, including Interactive Voice Response (IVR) learning tools on mobile devices that support individual professional development, teacher peer-learning platforms established using Whatsapp, and Learning Management Systems that support improved classroom practice.

Another challenge that impacts negatively on education is the lack of effective collection and utilization of important school data needed for effective service provision. To respond to this, Save the Children developed Waliku, an education information management system platform that improves tracking key metrics like student enrollment and attendance, and creates intuitive dashboards that allow teachers and school administrators to understand trends and formulative data-driven responses. Originally designed in Indonesia to help track and respond to student absenteeism, it has now been expanded to a more generalized EMS system that supports education projects in Malawi, the Philippines and Nigeria by monitoring a series of of health, personal and social risk factors for children’s learning and wellbeing.

In this presentation, we hear from two team members who share their experiences developing and deploying technologies to improve teacher professional development and education information management systems in Uganda, Indonesia and the Philippines. In doing, the presentation highlights practice and original research on the use of technology and data analytics in education-system strengthening in developing countries.

First, a team member from Uganda shares recent experiences rolling out Enable Education, a IVR-enabled teacher professional development for primary school teachers in three districts in western Uganda. He speaks to the process of designing and recording a series of 36 lesson tutorials for teachers, conducting user experience testing, working with vendor Viamo, and the ongoing back-end management of the platform. He also shares results from a pre- and post- test study which found knowledge improvements for 541 teachers. A second team member then shares the experience of developing Waliku using human-centered design, learnings from roll-out in the Indonesia context, and how the platform has been scaled for use in other countries. She shares empirical evidence from Indonesia, which showed that the platform increased school administrator knowledge of absenteeism and reduced student absenteeism among schools using Waliku in Indonesia, and more recent results from the Philippines.

Authors

• Mohini Venkatesh, Save the Children US

• IGNATIUS TEBUKOZA, Save the Children (Uganda)