How Can Technology Improve Learning? Information Technology, Education and Welfare in Niger

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Education is essential for economic and social development. Yet over 775 million adults worldwide are unable to read and write in any language (UNESCO 2012). These indicators are particularly low in the landlocked countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where literacy rates are less than 40 percent. In Niger, the subject of our study, fewer than 30 percent of the population is literate, with large discrepancies between men and women.Despite the immediate private and social returns to adult education, adult education programs are a highly neglected entry point for development interventions. This is often attributed to low enrollment, high drop-out and rapid skills depreciation (Romain and Armstrong 1987, Abadzi 1994, Oxenham et al 2002, Ortega and Rodriguez 2008), possibly due to the limited relevance of such skills in daily life or limited opportunities to practice in one's native language.The widespread growth of mobile phone coverage in many developing countries, including Niger, has the potential to increase the incentives for and facilitate the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills by illiterate adults. By teaching students how to use mobile phones, adult learners may be able to practice their literacy skills outside of class by sending and receiving short message services (SMS), making phone calls and using mobile money (m-money) applications, all of which require basic fluency with the numbers, symbols and letters on mobile phone keypads. Mobile phone technology could also affect returns to education by allowing households to use the technology for other purposes, such as obtaining price and labor market information and facilitating informal private transfers (Aker and Mbiti 2010).Our research team ran a successful randomized evaluation in Niger in 2009-2011 (Project ABC) and showed that a mobile phone-enhanced adult education program improved literacy and math skills of adult education participants by 19-25 s.d., equivalent to an additional year of education (Aker et al 2012). This difference remains significant over time, even as learning depreciates. Building upon the successful pilot program, this research will provide rigorous evidence on the impacts of adult education programs on educational and socio-economic outcomes in Niger. Yet more importantly, this research will assess the extent to which information technology - in particular, mobile phones -- can affect learning outcomes and households' asset ownership, ability to deal with shocks and farm and off-farm earnings. This will be achieved by including two variations of the basic education intervention. The first variation will teach students in the basic adult education course how to use mobile phones, similar to a previous pilot program in Niger. The second intervention will also provide educational content to adult learners via short message service (SMS), thereby allowing us to measure the extent to which information technology can be used as a distance-learning tool. In addition to its impacts on adult learning, this research will also investigate the extent to which adult education influences parents' investments in children's educational outcomes and which education affects intra-household and intra-village decision-making. And finally, since the research will be conducted in an expanded study population (250 villages, as compared with 117 in the pilot), we will be able to assess the scalability of the approach, thus allowing us to directly address the first overarching research question set out in this call for proposal ("What approaches are most effective in enabling the poorest to exit and stay out of poverty, and under what conditions can such approaches be replicated elsewhere and at scale?")This research will be achieved through a unique collaboration between Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and researchers at Tufts University, the University of Ottawa, the London School of Economics and the University of Abdoul Moumouni.