Community Empowerment Program (CEP): Tostan’s Transformational Education Alternative Empowering Indigenous West African Communities in the new Digital Context

• In Event: Fostering Peace Education, Countering Militaristic Education, and and Empowering Communities in Diverse National Contexts

Proposal

It may be hard to imagine, but there are existing examples of ed tech alternatives that:

• Bridge the digital divide by including indigenous African communities
• Adapt digital technology to support relevant goals of and applications by indigenous local language communities
• Re-orient digital tech to promote Community Well-Being and community agency, not corporate data-mining, profit or test score results.

This presentation will describe the design and impact of several of Tostan International’s experiments with digital technology empowering indigenous local language communities in West Africa. It will outline the unique social landscape of indigenous local language communities in West Africa that persist at the core of modernizing Francophone and Anglophone West African nations, where most countries remain complicated multi-ethnic societies, universal participation in formal education is an ongoing work in progress, and functional literacy rates are rapidly rising but wide inter-generational gaps remain. In this context, multi-lingual education remains a challenge, digital formal education tech is still very limited, and digital access via low-cost phones is accelerating outside formal systems.

The presentation will also briefly describe the history and creative evolution of Tostan’s flagship long-standing local language African-inspired education program called the Community Empowerment Program (CEP). It will then highlight several experiments with digital technology in the CEP program context, and lessons learned from them. A “learning process” approach, centered on feedback loops with local communities, powers the purposeful and sensitive community-empowering evolution of Tostan’s program, so lessons learned about how to tailor digital tech to local community goals and interests will be highlighted.

Finally, the presentation will highlight how the Tostan CEP and digital experiments are examples of transformational education that begin to shift social norms, power relations, reduce barriers to indigenous participation in nation-building and civics processes, and allow local communities to shape new forms of economic and social cooperation advancing Community Well-Being. This pioneering experimentation with community-level social transformation through local language African-inspired education is the hallmark of Tostan. The author and discussant welcome the chance to engage in dialogue with other international education allies about new ways to harness digital technology in liberatory education for social transformation.

Authors

• Michael Gibbons, American University

• Molly Melching, Tostan