MDGs: how mobile phones can help achieve gender equality in education

Mobile-based literacy projects can transform the lives of women in Africa and Asia, but despite abundance of phones access remains a barrier.

Ronda Zelezny-Green

Goal three of the UN's MDGs is to promote gender equality and empower women, including in education. A UN fact sheet from 2010 reveals that gender inequality in education access persists, and while some progress has been made in boosting girls' enrolment at the primary and secondary levels, a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, western Asia and Oceania are in danger of missing the 2015 deadline for gender equality.

The same three regions have experienced phenomenal levels of growth in mobile phone access since 2000. While women's and girls' access to mobile phones generally lags when compared to men, gains are being made as costs of ownership fall. But where do gender parity in education and access to mobile phones intersect?

In many of the places where gender parity in education is most unequal, school systems are plagued by a lack of trained (female) teachers, a scarcity of up-to-date educational materials (especially in mother-tongue languages), and demands placed on the time during the day women and girls are expected to contribute to helping run households and/or businesses for their families. Although mobile phones may not be able to resolve all of these challenges, they could provide assistance.

Mobile phones are increasingly affordable for women and girls in developing countries, offer additional freedom in deciding when and where to use them for learning, and can provide on-demand access to voice- and text-based instructional materials. These characteristics of mobiles, when leveraged appropriately, can help increase gender equality in education by offering training opportunities to prepare additional (female) teachers to enter classrooms, facilitate free access to resources such as Wikipedia for women and girls, as well as enable a degree of flexibility for the time and places that learning can occur.

Yet with all the hype surrounding mobiles for development (M4D), mobile-based learning opportunities devised with women and girls as the intended beneficiaries are surprisingly rare. One reason for this could be that central to an intervention's perceived success is the length of time it takes to register positive outcomes. I believe that this is one of the main factors that stymie the potential of the emerging field of gender, learning and mobiles, especially when operating within an aid context where donors expect large-scale benefits – within months instead of years – with the lowest possible upfront costs to yield these benefits.

Making girls and women wait for access to education when mobile phones are available (or becoming available) to them could be one of the greatest missed opportunities in the coming decade. Here's how we can work to harness the potential of mobile learning to increase gender equality in education alongside existing efforts that do not make use of technology:

Support stakeholders that recognise the promise

Supporting organisations working towards realising gender parity in education with time, funding, devices or expertise can help build additional evidence of the benefits and challenges to be addressed for mobile learning interventions designed to benefit women and girls.

Unesco and International Telecommunications Union (ITU) are currently involved in the gender and mobile learning space.

Unesco leads the Mobile Phone Literacy project, whose aim is to document the factors that help make mobile-based literacy interventions for women and girls both sustainable and effective on a large scale. A mobile-based post-literacy programme by Uesco Pakistan has demonstrated significant literacy gains for female participants.

ITU's irls in ICT and Tech needs girls are two platforms that hope to remove barriers that often prevent girls and women from using mobile technology or pursuing education or careers in the field. Related to this campaign was the announcement of a Mobile apps challenge for secondary school-age girls, a global competition where girls will work in teams with a classroom teacher and technology mentor to learn how to create mobile-based apps to address problems in their communities.

Women's technology organisations in Africa and elsewhere provide a bottom-up mechanism to get involved with projects and programmes such as coding camps that can encourage stronger links between gender and mobile learning.

Empower women and girls as designers

Research I conducted with secondary school girls in Nairobi in May and June 2012 illustrated that much can be gleaned from the ideas of girls determined to obtain an education. I observed and interviewed a number of girls who were creatively leveraging mobiles to help realise personal school goals by forming informal mobile-based learning communities and searching for information unavailable at their schools or in their books.

Ensuring that women and girls lead the design of mobile learning interventions can help increase the possibility that interventions will meet their needs – and fuel gains for gender parity in education.

Ronda Zelezny-Green is a PhD student exploring links between gender, learning and mobiles in the ICT4D collective at Royal Holloway, University of London. She tweets as @GLaM_Leo and blogs on her personal website.