The use of mobile phones in the Philippines and Tanzania has increased access to quality education among grade five and six students, according to Allan Williams, Vice President at the International Youth Foundation. He was speaking during the workshop called “Bringing Mobile solutions to scale: issues and models,” at the MobileActive08 conference currently underway in Johannesburg.

Williams said, “The BridgeIt project is at the centre of increasing the quality of education through the innovative use of technology such as mobile phones”. The project is providing teachers with access to a variety of digital video content in Maths, Science, English and life skills for use in their classrooms. This is done through the use of mobile phones which activate digital files on the server to be delivered to a mobile phone or a DVR, and later viewed on TV during a class session.

This technology is helping schools to have study materials which in most cases are not available. Currently the project is being implemented in 938 schools in the Philippines, and reaching out to 1241 primary school teachers. They in turn reach out to 357 000 pupils in rural and urban schools. In Tanzania, 10 000 students are being reached in 200 schools, of which 50% are girls. The goal of the project is to significantly improve the the quality of education and achievement among boys and girls in primary education.

The BridgeIt project's main objective is to improve teacher’s performance in BridgeIt classrooms by changing in the quality of teacher-pupil interaction. It also increases the learning gains and knowledge retention among upper primary students, with a particular emphasis on girls. The International Youth Foundation is implementing this project in partnership with the Ministry of Education in the two countries.

Nokia is the pilot funder, and the company is also bringing in technical infrastructure and software applications. USAID is also bringing in financial support, while Pearson is providing educational multimedia content, curriculum integration and teacher training.

It is worth noting that over 536 schools are fully operational with a broad curriculum and 116,000 students in fifth and sixth grades are receiving the service. BridgeIt has also established strong local ownership with broad-based private and civil society support, to demonstrate the power of multi-sector partnership.

If technology has played a big role in changing classroom dynamics from a teacher-centred approach to teacher /student collaborative learning, then my wish is that a project like this should not only be a pilot, but be scaled up if the potential of mobile technology is to have social impact.