Lakou Kajou’s Eksploratoryòm

In Haiti, only 57% of children are enrolled in primary school and of those 49% cannot read a single word when they enter the third grade. Fewer than 30% of those students reach 6th grade.

The COVID-19 pandemic was far from the first time that schools were forced to close in Haiti. UNICEF estimates that more than half a million children are out of school due to a lack of educational services, parents’ inability to pay, gang violence, natural disasters, civil unrest, and the COVID-19 pandemic. When schools closed around the world in 2020, Haitian children had already been out of school for most of the prior school year due to civil unrest. Given the political instability and vulnerability to natural disasters, distance learning is a critical, on-going need in Haiti.

Magnifying these educational disruptions are significant gaps in delivering educational experiences to children living in rural areas, even in the best of times. Technological solutions must be creative, because electricity and Internet access is limited. While a majority of Haitian adults own a mobile phone, Internet data plans are expensive.

Lakou Kajou’s Eksploratoryòm takes children on a journey of exploration, engaging them with interactive science lessons that can be delivered during times when school is unavailable, even in remote locations.

Eksploratoryòm is produced by Haitian artists, musicians, educators, and media specialists with technical support from Blue Butterfly, a US-based educational nonprofit organization. The program’s playful, culturally relevant stories, games, and songs match the Haitian Ministry of Education’s national science curriculum and drive skill building in social-emotional wellbeing, health, and literacy.

Rather than using the didactic, top-down learning approach typical in Haiti, Eksploratoryòm builds children’s understanding through captivating stories that are relatable and fun. In one lesson, a girl learns about vertebrates when she takes care of a puppy; she discovers it has a backbone and so does she! In another lesson, a boy learns about the circulatory system and his health when his heart beats fast after he was running.

We are partnering with Viamo, a leading provider of interactive voice response (IVR) applications, to distribute Eksploratoryòm in remote areas of Haiti. Using a regular mobile phone (Internet access isn’t required), families call a central number and select from a menu of stories, songs, and lessons that captivate children’s imagination.

Eksploratoryòm is targeted to early primary learners (1st and 2nd grades) in Haiti where distance learning opportunities are especially needed due to the high frequency of school closures.

Our IVR implementation of Eksploratoryòm will reach children in the South of Haiti, which continues to be severally affected by an earthquake that hit in August 2021. The lack of gas due to gang activities limits efforts to stabilize the region. Food insecurity and child malnutrition are on the rise. Households we have surveyed report ongoing challenges including destroyed homes, livelihoods lost or stagnant, and lack of even basic services. The disruption of the value chains, blocked transportation options, and the general instability has led to a drastic decline of agricultural productivity in an area where over 60 percent of the population depends on agriculture.

Eksploratoryòm will not only educate these underserved children, but it will also provide them with a sense of hope and security during a challenging time. Eksploratoryòm’s stories meet objectives around socio-emotional learning, providing much needed psychosocial support to children.

We have evidence that our strategy works. A randomized controlled trial conducted by the University of Maryland (USA), found that viewers who watched Lakou Kajou made learning gains in all the areas of the curriculum tested.

Blue Butterfly’s Lakou Kajou initiative, of which Eksploratoryòm is a part, has been delivering high-quality, culturally relevant educational experiences to young Haitians since 2016. Our Lakou Kajou team, based in Port-au-Prince, is comprised of Haitian educators whose lived experience mirrors the day-to-day reality of the children we serve. That team provides vision and direction for our programs, which are developed by local artists, musicians, and film producers. What makes Lakou Kajou so widely beloved in Haiti is the way that our audience can relate to the characters and settings. Haitian children rarely experience media that reflects the people and places they see every day.

The specific project proposed here—an IVR implementation of Eksploratoryòm in the region of Haiti directly affected by last August’s earthquake—is a scaling up of a pilot program we have conducted for the past six months. Over 9,000 families participated in the pilot, providing us with data on engagement and comprehension. We also conducted informal interviews with a sub-sample of families, whose feedback will help us enhance the expansion.

Thanks to a partnership with AMURT-Haiti, which is currently providing humanitarian services in the region, we are placing a staff person in the region this spring to coordinate with local schools and radio stations. That person will be in place to recruit users and provide technical support for this proposed IVR implementation. Costs for shipping, logistics, and accommodations will be low because our partner AMURT-Haiti has existing resources in the region.

We are energized by the prospect of participating in MIT Solve! We are experts in content development for young children. Our materials are only as effective as the platforms for delivering them. We will benefit from the MIT Solve community's insights with respect to optimizing our content for mobile applications. Access to coaching from experts who have implemented similar applications in other low-resourced settings will help ensure that our implementation is well received. In addition, we are optimistic that access to other Solvers may introduce us to other technological platforms that could be effectively implemented in our target communities.

Too often, solutions to reach populations in remote areas focus on the technology, without consideration of the content that technology will deliver. Our approach is different—we begin by collaborating with local artists, writers, musicians, and educators who understand the populations we serve. Together we create high-quality, culturally relevant, engaging educational content. As we produce, we also study the ways to most effectively provide what we create to the populations we serve. Rather than deploying a “one-size-fits all” approach, we know that to reach disenfranchised communities with sustainable programming, it is essential to tailor the way content is delivered to meet the specific needs of the communities targeted. This customization requires more than merely placing content on a different distribution platform. It means examining ways to deploy the best features of a given technology so that the format enhances the educational experience.

In this case, we are customizing our ground-breaking science learning series for delivery via IVR because of our deep knowledge of this community. This low-tech solution is best suited to reach these families; it uses devices (simple phones) that most families already have and does not require access to the Internet and/or a smart phone (both of which are rare in this community). Part of our innovation is our ability to utilize the best features of the technology (for example, aspects such as IVR’s quizzing capabilities) to reinforce learning and amplify engagement.

• GOAL 1 (this year): Apply lessons learned from our pilot to deliver our Eksploratoryòm series to 1st & 2nd grade children in remote communities in Haiti via IVR.
• GOAL 2 (within five years): Expand the content for Eksploratoryòm to additional grade levels (preK to 3rd Grade). Results from the implementation with 1st & 2nd graders will situate us well to secure the additional funding required.
• GOAL 3 (within five years): Expand our program for use in at least one additional Caribbean country. We will make our content available to organizations working in other countries and assist them in adapting the content for their use.

We are primed to achieve these goals through a step-wise expansion over a five-year period. The steps will include:

1.     Expand our IVR implementation of Eksploratoryòm by targeting communities hardest hit by the August 2021 earthquake. This implementation will make the content available throughout the country, but we will focus recruitment efforts on these communities, which are in greatest need due to the ongoing humanitarian crisis.

2.     Focus our fundraising activities on securing support to expand Eksploratoryòm to include preK and 3rd grade.

3.     After developing the additional content, we will be well-positioned to seek additional funding for a country-wide recruitment effort focused on Haitian families with children ages 5 to 9. Recruitment will include outreach activities through schools, churches, and community organizations, as well as partnerships with local radio broadcasters.

4.     Once the Haiti-wide implementation is established, we will seek partners in other Caribbean countries (particularly those whose languages share linguistic history with Haitian Creole). We will work with those partners to adapt the Eksploratoryòm content for use in those locations.

We will use a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures to monitor our progress toward meeting our five-year impact goals. Quantitative measures will include tracking the number of children who successfully complete the program as well as other metrics such as length of time of engagement. We will also gauge program impact by engaging local researchers to conduct research (focus groups and one-one-interviews with participants) to learn about the effectiveness of the implementation, gain feedback from families on usage and test children’s learning from the educational messages. More specifically the indicators will include:

• Number of users completing at least one lesson
• Average number of lessons completed
• Number of users completing all lessons
• Consistency of engagement: average time on task
• Likability (5-point scale and qualitative assessment)
• Ease of use (5-point scale and qualitative assessment)
• Barriers to access (qualitative assessment)
• Change in knowledge of the science concepts presented in the lessons (pre-/post-test of children’s learning) (indicated by significant positive change at p<.05 level)

Our theory of change is simple: because children are attracted to Eksploratoryòm’s engaging, culturally-relevant content, they show improvement across the Whole Child Curriculum—core domains of science, literacy, and math as well as transversal domains of socio-emotional learning, civic pride, critical thinking, and gender & racial equity. These improved skills set them on the path of becoming lifelong learners. Our theory of change is inspired by Bandura’s social learning principles, which emphasize the importance of modeling behavior to affect change. Well-designed educational media that explicitly presents positive social interaction has been found to be one of the most effective ways to promote lasting impact on attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. Ensuring that children have access to our content—whose stories, characters and context are relatable to our audience—offers one solution to the complex problem of lack of access to educational experiences by bringing a new way of thinking and behaving to Haiti’s youngest generation.

This project will use integrated voice response (IVR) to deliver educational programming to children in remote regions of Haiti. Users call a central number and through a series of menus, they navigate to the Eksploratoryòm to listen to lessons, songs, and stories, on their own schedule. The system's interactivity allows us to ask simple questions at the end of the lesson to check for comprehension. We will partner with Viamo, whose IVR system is available in Haiti for free, thanks to Viamo's agreement with Digicel (Haiti's major mobile provider). Viamo has proven results using IVR to distribute educational content worldwide. Here are results from an implementation of their product in Tanzania.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of Blue Butterfly’s work. All our programming supports our commitment to these principles. The aim of Lakou Kajou is to elevate the opportunities of a disenfranchised community by providing access to high-quality, culturally relevant educational content.

Examples of how we weave these principles into our educational media include:

• Our lesson on photosynthesis features a story of a boy and a girl conducting an experiment in their backyard. The implicit message conveyed is that both girls and boys are capable of science work.
• Eksploratoryòm listeners are invited to respond to open-ended questions that allow them to explore the world around them. This type of active learning is the exception in Haiti, where schools mostly promote a didactic pedagogy that inhibits equitable exploration.
• To address issues of inclusion, we design programming that can be delivered to communities that typically lack access to high-quality educational experiences.

Our working team embodies these principles as well. Our team in Haiti is comprised of Haitian nationals and is woman-led. We have a collaborative management structure that encourages input from all team members. We hire in-country contractors to complete production activities, including audio production, graphic design, printing, writing, and illustration.

Blue Butterfly’s mission is to inspire a generation of lifelong learners through the power of engaging educational media. Our beneficiaries for the Lakou Kajou program are young children (ages 4 to 9) throughout Haiti. We provide the following services:

• Video and audio programming, delivered through partnerships with community groups & broadcasters and through Internet and other technologies;
• School-based programming, delivered through partnerships with school networks.

We have a diversified funding stream that includes foundation grants, government & private contracts, and individual donations. Thanks to our generous donors, we are able to sustain the Lakou Kajou program into the foreseeable future.

Grants from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation have supported the basic operating budget of the Lakou Kajou program in Haiti since 2014. In addition, we have secured funding for supplemental activities in Haiti from a variety of organizations, including:

• Ayiti Community Trust (2021)
• La Fondation Connaissance et Liberté (2018)
• Interamerican Development Bank, via the Haitian Ministry of Education, (2021)
• World Vision (2021)