Misfortunes never come singly. Although less than 1% of the population has been diagnosed with Ebola, to tackle the outbreak and avoid spreading the disease, Liberia's Government has shut down all schools in July, leaving 1.4 million children with no education for over 4 months now.
To lend a hand and help kids continue their schooling, a Toronto-based tech startup called the Rumie Initiative is raising money on Indiegogo to send in the country $50 tablets pre-loaded with educational content. The devices can be used by the children to self-teach themselves, or in communities with the help of a tutor.
"The way that the device looks is that there's a 'Learn' section. The Learn section has all of the educational contents and it's organized in an easy way for the kids to see," Rumie's founder Tariq Fancy tells me. "Then, separately, there's a game section, the 'Play' section. That section is locked. The way it works is that, the game section, you could only unlock it by doing exercises or if the teacher or the administrator gives a code. That unlocks 10 minutes of playing the games or 20 minutes of playing the games, whatever they decide. That is just to create the incentive."
Some tablets were previously sent as part as a rehabiliation program for former child soldiers, but the Ebola emergency pushed the organization to rethink and expand the scope of the initiative.
Connectivity is not needed, but if the kids are able to go online and synchronize the device even just one a month, this can provide useful insight. "In the aid industry - Fancy says - you have billions of dollars going to build libraries and no one actually knows if they are used and how. There's no real data. For the first time, we're able to actually have real data."
Actually, this is only partly true, as there are other non profit educational initiatives, like WorldReader, that deliver educational content on smartphones and can track what people read, how much they read, and even collect demographic data about the users, as as the recent UNESCO report "Reading in the mobile age" makes clear. But it's surely correct if we compare tablets with physical libraries.
Rumie is also working to send the tablets in other nations, mostly belonging to the developing world: from Pakistan, where a project to foster girls' education is in the works, to Uganda, the Philippines, Brazil.
Sounds great. But who decides what kind of content is pre-loaded on the tablets? When it comes to exporting education it's easy to adopt a paternalistic attitude, and assume that just because you come from a "developed" country, you know what works and what doesn't.
The lukewarm reception of Nicholas Negroponte's well-known One Laptop Per Child project, is perhaps the best manifesto of the dangers of this kind of approach.
This is a challenge Rumie tries to bypass by suggesting a range of choices and relying on local partners to make the final decision on which material to include. They also tend to focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) disciplines, as they speak a universal language and are less likely to ignite controversies.
In the future, Fancy hopes to launch the format also in the poorest areas of the so-called First World countries. "I think, in a lot of developed countries, the bottom 10 percent of the population needs something like this," he says. "Not most of the population, only some. We are looking at something in Queens, New York. We're looking at something in a poorer area of Toronto, which is easy because we're based here. We're looking at Moldova."
An online platform, the Rumie Learn Cloud, will also be launched soon. It will allow users to share and explore the best free educational content on the Web, while building at the same time a huge repository of learning material to make available for anyone in the world to use.
