Before the advent of mobile phones, life in Africa was extremely difficult. Over and above the extreme poverty, chronic lack of medical facilities and food, telephones rarely worked, roads were impassable and education, in many cases, relegated to the back burner. Illiteracy and poor education is always a massive problem because it, invariably, leads to poverty and corruption.

Since a good education provides the human capital needed to improve productivity and facilitate development, it seems crazy to pay so little attention to education in Africa! After all it’s the only way people will acquire skills needed to promote growth and development. So where does SMS come in?

African children travel long distances to get to school, often under terrible climatic and political circumstances so it’s not uncommon to miss school and therefore, homework, tests, lessons, notes or advice as well as much needed help from the teachers. Over and above that, teaching materials are often non existent with a single text book shared amongst many and pencils and paper in very short supply.

But things have changed. The advent of mobile phones heralded a new beginning for Africans because reliable communication became a reality and not a dream. Today 28% of all Africans use mobile phones and two thirds of the world’s mobile users live in developing countries with the majority of mobile users being teenagers or in their twenties. Donor agencies have known this for years and ABDI & UNESCO sponsored the first Mobile Learning workshop in Tokyo in 2005, the report is available online and well worth the read. It focussed mainly on using SMS to support current teaching and learning processes but not in place of current teaching materials. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s possible to replace a larger part of a current syllabus with SMS technology. Bear in mind that the generation of teachers & educators who currently design school syllabuses do not use SMS to the extent that the pupils do and probably wouldn’t know how to; it’s understandable, therefore, that they will not be as innovative as technology could allow when it comes to designing a methodology whereby the child can utilize SMS to access teaching materials at their own pace. This is where the SMS specialists come into the picture and this is where the mindset of the average educator has to change. It doesn’t mean that the child need not go to school or have access to class mates, teachers and discussions. Of course not (though, long distance learning has been proved to be very effective in Africa). It does mean, though, that we have to look at the situation in Africa and design a system that will ultimately benefit the child and not so much the teacher (who in many instances is poorly educated because of the massive ‘brain drain’ caused when well qualified teachers leave to find employment in developed countries). In order to do this the educators need to talk to children and to the specialists who will design the systems. In Niger, literacy programmes for adults have been taught where to find letters and numbers on a mobile phone to send and receive SMS; students quickly learnt to send SMS’s in their own languages to friends and family & in so doing, they practice what they’ve learnt. In regions without local language newspapers and certainly no libraries, SMS makes literacy functional. Preliminary results suggest that the mobile phone-based participants are learning faster than students in normal literacy classes, achieving levels that are up to 30 % higher! Sure, there are many other pilot projects all over the world from Thailand, Mongolia, India to the Philippines with text2teach project probably the biggest I’ve come across. It’s clear that  SMS is not being used as efficiently as it can be used, especially not in an era where apps can be designed to suit a particular education system. SMS costs so much less than paper and since the world is running out of paper and Africa cannot afford computers for each student, more use should and can be made the mobile phone and SMS. Of course the ideal solution would be to use smartphones but since they won’t be dropping in price sufficiently to make them economically viable for Africa, one would have to look at other solutions and there are many. Once again we’re faced with the clash between the mindset of the average African educator and the technological possibilities that would suit the average African teen.

Africa doesn’t have time to waste and education is vital to the development and well being of the entire continent so it’s probably about time the generations start co-operating and accept the ways of the past just aren’t going to work anymore.