Soma

A learning app designed for rural schools in East Africa to allow students to learn in their own language at their own pace. 

Our solution is an app which is designed to complement school learning for rural students in East Africa. It aims to tackle the lack of technology skills, overcrowded classrooms, and poor English skills which are all issues facing rural students. 

The app is designed to run alongside normal classes to allow students to learn at their own pace with minimal supervision to prevent further overstretching teachers. All content is in Swahili and English, as requested by multiple teachers and students in the design stage, so as to allow students to learn in their own language whilst becoming familiar with English terms for their exams. It can be downloaded from a local server and shared peer-to-peer, eliminating the need for a strong network, which is often lacking in rural settings. Although it has been tested in Tanzania, this solution could be used to help rural students further throughout East Africa. 

The main problem that our solution is trying to solve is that of poor educational outcomes in rural schools, specifically in Tanzania. This problem can be broken down into three main challenges. 

The first is access to technology. Many students will have never held a smartphone or seen a computer before, but are still expected to take exams in ICT. In contrast, students in urban areas generally have greater access to technology. The second is overcrowding. The student-teacher ratio in rural schools is typically very high. The school we have been testing our solution in typically has 80 students in a class with one teacher. The third challenge is language. Although secondary school in Tanzania is taught in English, very few rural students speak it well as it is often their third or fourth language, meaning that they struggle to learn other subjects, and find it impossible to write their final exams in English.

Aside from these specific challenges, many students also suffer from a lack of confidence in and enthusiasm towards their studies due to parental pressure, poor teaching, or cultural expectations such as that it is not valuable for a girl to have an education. 

This app has been created for rural pupils in East Africa. Many of the students we work with currently are not expected to do well in school, and some are actively encouraged by their parents to fail their exams so that they need not attend secondary school, but can instead help on their family farms. Many are married early, or miss several years of schooling to assist in family businesses. In one particular school that we have visited, every child failed their final year secondary school mathematics exam. 

This app, Soma, will impact the lives of students by giving them access to quality learning materials that they can understand and which they can take as long as they need to learn. Currently, the majority of rural classes are taught in overcrowded classrooms which are distracting, in a language that many students struggle to understand, at a fast pace which many students cannot keep up with. This is not an environment which is conducive to effective learning. In addition, Soma will give students the opportunity to learn much-needed technology skills through an interactive app. 

It is worth highlighting that this type of solution does not exist in rural Tanzania. As exams are in English, students simply do not have access to high-quality learning material in Swahili, which many of them would understand far better (Tanzanian primary school is taught exclusively in Swahili, whilst secondary school is taught in English). 

Both members of the team behind Soma have worked in East Africa in communities alongside local partners in Tanzania on projects mainly related to energy access. During this time, we have run focus groups with different sectors of communities in rural Tanzania, to gain qualitative data on their needs and preferences for improving their lives. Lack of education has consistently arisen as a priority problem in these focus groups. 

The Soma team has visited several schools in rural Tanzania and spoken with teachers there to identify problems facing rural education. We have worked with them to develop Soma, taking their input on board regarding both the design and content of the app to maximise the potential benefit to the rural students that they teach. 

This solution has been tested in Simanjiro district, Tanzania. In 2018, there were over 2.2 million secondary school students in Tanzania (1), and 66% of the population lived rurally (2). It is difficult to know the exact percentage of rural children that attend school, as truancy and drop-out rates are high, but these figures still represent the chance for our solution to reach a high number of pupils. These figures focus only on Tanzania, and do not represent the opportunity to expand to other Swahili-speaking regions in East Africa. 

1. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/factsheet/2020/03/31/tanzania-secondary-education-quality-improvement-program-sequip

2. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS?locations=TZ 

Our main achievements have been the creation of an app with mathematics content for the Tanzanian Form One curriculum, and four phases of testing of this app in a secondary school in rural Tanzania. 

Phase 1 involved testing different teaching apps with students to discover more about their learning preferences and needs. Phase 2 tested an initial version of the app in English and Swahili, and Phase 3 was a longer test in which students were given devices containing the app to use with minimal supervision for six weeks. Phase 4 involved implementing technology locally, including installing and testing a local server from which students can download learning content. We have also notified the District Education officer for the district in which we are working of our ongoing testing in schools, and gained his support for further roll-out. 

The solution is further than the ‘Prototype’ phase as it has already been tested, but not as far as the ‘Growth’ stage as it is not a fully established product. It requires further content and testing in further locations. 

The core technology that powers our solution is an app which can be downloaded onto smartphones from a local server and shared peer-to-peer. Therefore, it does not require an internet connection to download onto a smartphone, or to share between mobile phones. In addition, it can be used on an Android emulator on computers for areas where no smartphones can be acquired or provided. 

The app will be used by students individually outside regular lessons in rural areas where the network is very poor. The local server, which is a Rachel (Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning) server, will contain the app which can be downloaded. This local server will be stored in a central location, such as a school. If the local server fails for any reason, or a student studies at a different school but still wants to use the app, it can be shared peer-to-peer between Android phones. 

The pilot study system has been trialled with 30 students in one school. In one year we plan to have expanded to ten further schools, and develop content across three different year groups so that we will reach approximately 3000 more students. In order to facilitate this, we will work with the District Officers in the Education department to reach out to teachers and demonstrate the solution in multiple schools. We have already reached out to and met with the District Education officer in Simanjiro District, Tanzania, who supports our idea of expanding the pilot to other schools and will help to facilitate this. It is important to reach several different schools at an early stage in order to get different opinions from children of varying backgrounds and improve the app.

Our first impact goal in the next year is to reach ten more schools with our solution. This will involve having an extended trial with each for a minimum of six weeks. This will ensure that we get varying opinions from students from different schools and backgrounds. In order to facilitate this, we will use various teacher contacts in these schools, alongside the assistance of ward councillors, district officers, and our local partner organisation, OMASI, to set up trials in these schools. This stage may also require finding funding for smartphone devices if the schools in question do not have computers. 

Our second impact goal is to generate enough content to cover the entire Tanzanian maths curriculum for Form One, and to have started work on other preferred subjects as suggested by students, such as biology, chemistry and physics. This will involve finding dedicated content creators who are adept at both Swahili and the subject they will be teaching, and training them in a standardised content creation process. 

Our third goal is, by the end of the year, to be in a position to roll out the solution further throughout Tanzania. This will involve making more contact with District Officials in other districts, particularly those responsible for Education and Administration. It will also involve reaching out to more teachers and schools who would be willing to take part in this project. 

These impact goals will be measured through student results and feedback surveys, to keep track of the number of students and schools impacted, and on their experience of using our solution. Teacher surveys will also provide invaluable advice on how to improve our solution. We will use long-term attainment datasets to see how the students’ learning outcomes have been impacted by the solution, and data on the number of students pursuing the next level of education. In the long term, we would use income data for students to understand if using this solution has had an impact on their earning potential. 

We will also track the quantity of content produced, and have independent quality assessors, most likely secondary school teachers, who can check that the teaching content produced is of sufficient quality. 

We anticipate several specific barriers in the next year. 

Firstly, we anticipate a challenge in finding funding to develop content. There is very little high-quality Swahili learning content, as all secondary schools are taught in English, meaning that the vast majority of videos, articles and practice questions are in English. Therefore, funding is required to create this content, and we need to establish connections with qualified people with a good level of English and Swahili to make this content. 

Secondly, we anticipate a challenge in school infrastructure. In order for this solution to work, students need electronic devices to use the app on. Many schools have little or no such infrastructure, so some training will be needed to show teachers how the app can be used on existing computers, or smartphone devices will need to be funded and provided. 

Thirdly, we require regulatory approval of the system for further integration into school use. 

Fourth, we anticipate challenges in travel and communication due to the covid pandemic, which affects a lot of international work. 

Zoe Slattery, the team lead, has a degree in Electronic Engineering (MEng) from Imperial College London, and a further master’s degree in Engineering for Sustainable Development from the University of Cambridge. She has worked in India in app development, on an app designed to report sexual harassment of women, and in East Africa for over a year in a company which focuses on rural development, specifically on using energy as a catalyst for development. These experiences have given her an important mixture of technical skill alongside a deep understanding of the challenges involved in rural development, and implementing technology solutions in rural areas. 

Iona Smith has a MA degree in International Relations from the University of St Andrews, with an exchange year at the University of Hong Kong, and a further MSc in International Development from the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation focused on the nexus between information technology and human rights in Eastern Africa. She previously worked for a year in Namibia and Eswatini in rural education, and has recently started working for a company which focuses on rural development. This experience has equipped her with both a theoretical and practical understanding of the complexities associated with working in a rural development context, as well as gaining the socio-cultural awareness required to work in the field of international development.

Our work so far on developing this solution has been in close partnership with  Orkonerei Maasai Social Initiative (OMASI). This company works full-time in the Maasai region in Simanjiro district, Tanzania, and provides invaluable links to District Officers and teachers throughout the region. 

Our work has also involved the Smart Villages Research Group, a UK-based company through which we have carried out some in-country fieldwork such as the focus groups in rural areas. 

Our solution aligns well with the Pozen Social Innovation Prize’s goal to improve quality of life for women and girls. The long-term goal of our solution is that, through improved exam performance, we expect to see more students stay longer at school and continue on into tertiary education, thus opening up new job prospects. Performing well in school also has a huge impact in reducing early marriages and breaking the cycle of poverty, as teenage girls in rural Tanzania, particularly in the communities in which we have worked, if they are not performing well at school, are often married off if seen as a burden to their parents. The long-term outcome is therefore an improved quality of adult life for students, particularly girls, that have worked with our solution through school. 

In the trials that we have done, the girls using our solution have on average performed as well, if not better, than boys once given the opportunity to use the app and learn at their own pace. They have been enthusiastic about this opportunity, and their main criticism of the trial was that it was not provided to every student in the year. We would use the Pozen Social Innovation Prize to take on board their feedback - by providing the app to a greater number of students, and providing a wider range of content, thus positively impacting even more young girls’ lives with quality education.