32 research outputs found

    ABC, 123: The Impact of a Mobile Phone Literacy Program on Educational Outcomes

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    CGD non-resident fellow Jenny Aker and co-authors report on the results from a randomized evaluation of a mobile phone education program (Project ABC) in Niger, in which adult students learned how to use mobile phones as part of a literacy and numeracy class. Overall, students demonstrated substantial improvements in literacy and numeracy test scores. There is also evidence of persistent impacts: six months after the end of the first year of classes, students in the program retained what they had learned better than others. The effects do not appear to be driven by differences in teacher quality or in teacher and student attendance. The results suggest that simple and relatively cheap information and communication technology can serve as an effective and sustainable learning tool for rural populations.Education

    Mobiles and mobility: The Effect of Mobile Phones on Migration in Niger

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    Labor markets in developing countries are subject to a high degree of frictions. We report the results from a randomized evaluation of an adult education program (Project ABC) in Niger, in which students learned how to use simple mobile phones as part of a literacy and numeracy class. Overall, our preliminary results suggest that access to this technology substantially influenced seasonal migration in Niger, increasing the likelihood of migration by at least one household member by 7 percentage points and the number of households' members engaging in seasonal migration. Evidence suggests that there are some heterogeneous impacts of the program, with a higher probability of a household member migrating in one region. These effects do not appear to be driven by differences in observable characteristics of households or differential effects of drought during the survey period. Rather we posit that they are largely explained by the effectiveness of mobile phones as a search technology: Students in ABC villages used mobile phones in more active ways and communicated more with migrants within Niger. These initial results suggest that simple and cheap information technology can be harnessed to affect labor mobility among rural populations. --

    Guns and Roses: The Impact of the Kenyan Post-Election Violence on Flower Exporting Firms.

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    While political instability is broadly believed to be bad for economic growth., firm performance and foreign direct investment, few studies convincingly identify the causal impact of conflict on firms and export performance. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the Kenyan post-election violence on a hugely successful export oriented industry, the Kenyan flower industry,. Using export information on all Kenyan grower-exporters, we show that the conflict reduced Kenyan flowere exports by 24% overall. To account for demand shocks in the export markets, we then exploit the cross-regional variation in the post-election violence to identify the effect of the conflict on firms export volumes. We find that the conflict reduced exports by 23% for firms located in conflict areas, mainly through displacing workers. The displacement of semi-skilled workers is also shown to have had impacts substantially beyond the duration of the conflict. While there is no evidence to suggest that the conflict affected export volumes in the areas without conflict, we find evidence that it did change exporters behaviour. Shipments were consolidated and exported less frequently, while security expenses rose. This suggests that exporters in non-conflict areas reacted to the increased insecurity by transporting larger, more secured shipments to the airport less frequently.Ethnic Violence, Non-traditional Agriculture, Export Oriented Industry, Kenya

    Building Functional Adult Literacy and Numeracy with Mobile Phones: Can you Text me Now?

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    We report the short-term results from a randomized evaluation of a mobile phone literacy program (ABC) in Niger, in which adult literacy students learned how to use mobile phones as part of a literacy class. Students in mobile phone literacy villages showed substantial gains in numeracy exam scores. There is also evidence of heterogeneity in program effects across regions, suggesting the impact is context dependent. These results were stronger in one region, for women and for participants younger than 45. There was also evidence of learning dynamics: six months after the end of the first year of classes, students in ABC villages retained what they had learned better than the non-ABC students

    Mobiles and mobility: The Effect of Mobile Phones on Migration in Niger

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    Labor markets in developing countries are subject to a high degree of frictions. We report the results from a randomized evaluation of an adult education program (Project ABC) in Niger, in which students learned how to use simple mobile phones as part of a literacy and numeracy class. Overall, our preliminary results suggest that access to this technology substantially influenced seasonal migration in Niger, increasing the likelihood of migration by at least one household member by 7 percentage points and the number of households' members engaging in seasonal migration. Evidence suggests that there are some heterogeneous impacts of the program, with a higher probability of a household member migrating in one region. These effects do not appear to be driven by differences in observable characteristics of households or differential effects of drought during the survey period. Rather we posit that they are largely explained by the effectiveness of mobile phones as a search technology: Students in ABC villages used mobile phones in more active ways and communicated more with migrants within Niger. These initial results suggest that simple and cheap information technology can be harnessed to affect labor mobility among rural populations

    The impact of a computer based adult literacy program on literacy and numeracy : evidence from India

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    With over 700 million illiterate adults in the world, many governments have implemented adult literacy programs across the world, although typically with low rates of success partly because the quality of teaching is low. One solution may lie in the standardization of teaching provided by computer-aided instruction. We present the first rigorous evidence of the effectiveness of a computer-based adult literacy program. A randomized control trial study of TARA Akshar Plus, an Indian adult literacy program, was implemented in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India. We find large, significant impacts of this computer-aided program on literacy and numeracy outcomes. We compare the improvement in learning to that of other traditional adult literacy programs and conclude that TARA Akshar Plus is effective in increasing literacy and numeracy for illiterate adult women

    Can mobile phones improve agricultural outcomes? Evidence from a randomized experiment in Niger

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    The widespread growth of mobile phone coverage worldwide has offered new potential for increasing rural households’ access to information and public and private transfers. Yet despite the proliferation of mobile phone-based interventions in the agricultural sector, there is mixed evidence on their impact. We report the results of a randomized evaluation in Niger, in which rural households increased their access to information technology and their capacity to use it. We find that households in treated villages planted a more diverse basket of crops, particularly marginal cash crops grown by women. This did not increase the likelihood of selling these crops or the farm-gate price received, suggesting that other market failures need to be addressed to improve farmers’ welfare

    The impact of a computer-based adult literacy program on literacy and numeracy: Evidence from India

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    With over 700 million illiterate adults worldwide, governments in many developing countries have implemented adult literacy programs. Typically these programs have low rates of success partly because the quality of teaching is heterogeneous. Standardization of teaching provided by computer-aided instruction might be a solution. However, there is little rigorous evidence of the effectiveness of computer-based adult literacy programs in delivering high-quality literacy and numeracy in the developing world. To fill this void in the literature, we study the impact of a computer-based adult literacy program, Tara Akshar Plus, on the literacy and numeracy skills of previously illiterate adult women in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Through a randomized control trial, we measure learning outcomes with individual-level literacy and numeracy tests and find statistically significant positive impacts of this computer-aided program on literacy and numeracy outcomes of women who undergo the TARA Akshar Plus program—relative to the control group. The effects are statistically significant but small in magnitude for women who were entirely illiterate prior to the program. The learning impacts are substantially larger for learners who knew at least a handful of letters at the beginning of the program. We compare the improvement in learning to that of another adult literacy and numeracy program. We conclude that TARA Akshar Plus is the more effective of the two, but the literacy and numeracy level achieved are not large enough to make many entirely illiterate learners become functionally literate
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