The seventh annual Mobiles for Education (mEducation) Alliance Symposium, held October 5-6, 2017, brought together practitioners, thought leaders, policy makers, and funders to advance the use of and evidence for information and communications technology in global education (ICT4E).
Each year, the Steering Committee of the Alliance designs the Symposium to promote a shared understanding of the opportunities and challenges of implementing ICT4E solutions particularly in lower-resource, developing country contexts.
The event is designed to promote networking and partnership development among participants, who come from government, nonprofit, and private-sector organizations.
The guiding theme of this Symposium, “Future-Proofing Technology for Education in International Development” demonstrated the power of this gathering to discuss pathways to spread and scale promising The future-proofing theme was embedded into a novel Symposium application process: Prospective presenters were asked to submit proposals for presentations in which they would time-travel three years into the future. The presenters would retrace the future-proofing steps taken by The future-proofing theme helped presenters and participants envision pathways to implementing evidence-driven innovations at scale. The longer term vision is that this focus on sustainable, durable project designs would lead public sector policy makers to adopt and support such innovations in their countries.
We were delighted to be invited to present at the Symposium to share our work in improving educational outcomes in Kenya, and our involvement was featured in the report:
"Project iMlango is a comprehensive educational technology program delivered by a ground-breaking partnership of public and private sector organizations, which aims to improve Kenyan pupils’ learning outcomes, enrollment and retention. Avanti and sQuid, two of the project partners, highlighted their work in improving educational outcomes for over 68,000 girls in highly marginalized rural regions of Kenya. While iMlango serves a total of 150,000 male and female students, the project’s special focus on measuring and improving girls’ education outcomes derives from iMlango’s partnership with Ministry of Education in Kenya. Among the project’s key findings: Over 60 percent of the girls served became more interested in school because of the digital learning methods used. Among iMlango’s innovations is the platform’s mobile app for numeracy, which significantly accelerated students’ math progress. Other important project outcomes include improved student attendance overall and higher levels of teacher engagement."
For more information on the mEducation Alliance or their annual Symposium, please click here.