Digital Technologies: The Missing link in education-related parental empowerment and engagement initiatives.

• In Event: Empowering parents and communities through education and technology

Proposal

Introduction/Background

There are varied but interrelated connotations of the term parental empowerment and engagement (PE&E), all used in efforts to bolster learners’ learning outcomes. Within this presentation’s scope however, the term PE&E is anchored on the Kenyan Institute for Curriculum Development (KICD), which denotes all the processes and/or activities that are undertaken to promote the capacities of parents to enable them play active roles in nurturing their children’s potential both in, and while out of school (KICD, 2019). Evidence maintains that parents, caregivers, and the wider community play a critical role in modeling children’s overall development and growth (KICD, 2019; Cole, 2017; Hill & Tysson, 2009). Education’s role is to provide essential and important skills, values and attitudes that will enable learners in the present educational life as well as in the future world to contribute meaningfully to societal development (Kantova, 2024). It, therefore, calls for multi-pronged approaches, including active parental participation, and use of digital technologies to enhance PE&E initiatives to ensure that learners get appropriate skills considering that parents/caregivers/community are the first line trainers, educators and source of knowledge that children interact with (KICD, 2019). However, this is largely not the case in most contemporary contexts (Affuso et al., 2017; Dotti-Sani & Treas, 2017). For instance, today, more parents are becoming less engaged in both their parenting responsibilities as well as in their children’s learning processes for reasons including but not limited to prevailing parental economic conditions like employment that hinder meaningful parental engagements since parents have to be away for a prolonged period of time, familial and community structures and cultural practices that places the role of parenting on mothers thereby hindering active engagements of male parents, and the rise of digital technology and the accompanying social media platforms that has led to reduced time for parents, guardians and the wider community to be actively engaged in supporting children’s learning among others (Kantova, 2024; Del Boca et al., 2017). Consequently, it is imperative that parents/caregivers/communities be empowered to enable them to be able to skillfully identify children’s potential and talents.

Given the proven instrumental role of parents in enabling children’s acquisition of critical competences, Zizi Afrique Foundation (ZAF), in collaboration with members of the Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI), developed a framework to guide and promote active PE&E. In the resulting framework, four key pillars, for enhancing PE&E, dubbed the 4Cs, emerged. The pillars, representing the 4Cs were communication, collaboration, capacity building, and [leveraging] community resources, which are consistent with prevailing strategies for promoting parental empowerment (that is, training, advocacy, and resourcing) (KICD, 2019). The framework guided specific in-country interventions, including field immersions that helped respective countries (e.g., Kenya) to identify key barriers, (referred to as the missing link) to effective PE&E as well as the place of digital technology in enabling effective PE&E. In Kenya, the field immersions helped in identifying the barriers that hinder effective PE&E, whilst also giving perspectives on how digital technologies could be leveraged to enhance PE&E. This contributed to the development of solutions (e.g., toolkits) that could help ameliorate the existing PE&E bottlenecks, specifically in rural, remote, and marginalized contexts. This paper, while presenting preliminary findings, also gives insights on the place of digital technology on PE&E.

Methodologies

To identify the best approaches for enhancing PE&E, a multistage approach involving four stages was adopted. This included a systematic literature review of existing evidence, peer co-creation and team learning, evidence building (that entailed baseline assessments, piloting and evidence building against four pillars of the framework and analysis of expert opinions from the gathered qualitative data), and field immersions that entailed development of tools and engaging target parents and teachers in the community where they reside to obtain first hand feedback on the existing barriers to effective PE&E.

Findings

Preliminary findings indicate that in most rural, underserved, and marginalized contexts, access and use of digital technologies is limited, given the supportive and associated costs for sustaining and operating such digital resources. The identified associated costs are related to the internet, electricity, and capacity to use preferred digital resources owing to some users’ inability to read, which further negatively affected access to crucial digital resources. The immersion study further found that in the schools and community of focus, most school-community/parent communication (and vice versa) was done using letters and word of mouth, using children as messengers. Only in a few instances where such communication was done by handwritten letters. Interviewed parents decried that the limited use digital technologies, compounded by limited capacity to use such devices for school-parent communication limited effective parental engagements. This situation calls for enhanced distribution and investments in digital technologies as well as increased parental capacity building on the use of digital technologies. The immersion’s findings further helped develop targeted and tailored toolkits that highlight strategies for different personas of parents to help address specific gaps.

Conclusion

The study concludes that for effective PE&E, school-parent/community communication must incorporate blended communication channels that include both traditional means of communication as well as use technology-centred communication channels. Thus, there is need for increased investment in digital infrastructure, including provisioning of requisite digital communication solutions. The merit of this paper is that it aligns with the 2025 CIES conference as it underscores the utilization of digital technologies in PE&E initiatives.

Authors

• Vollan Okoth Ochieng, Zizi Afrique Foundation

• Irene Chepngetich, Zizi Afrique Foundation