This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns forced people to find ways to get things done remotely. Companies developed systems that made working from home run smoothly.
Educators also had to shift to mobile phones and group video calls to get their lessons across and make sure students didn't lose out on their progress. This exposed the need for education systems to be more resilient and adaptive to local and global disruptions. A recent Nature study explored how low-tech mobile phone programs could keep children learning when schools close because of major emergencies such as disease outbreaks, extreme weather or natural disasters.
Across India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda, researchers conducted large-scale randomized trials to test remote-learning methods delivered through simple mobile phones. Adding a weekly, one-on-one, 20-minute phone-call tutorial to text messages led to significant gains in basic math skills across all five countries. Students learned roughly three times more when they received phone calls tailored to their learning level.
The combined phone-call and SMS tutorial program cost just $11 per child. For every $100 spent, it generated 3.6 years of high-quality schooling, putting it among the top 10 most cost-effective education interventions ever evaluated, out of 150 studies worldwide. Nearly 25% of the world's population lives in countries where education is at risk of disruption because of political, medical or climate emergencies.
A recent report estimated that around 222 million children face regular disruptions to their education, losing precious opportunities to learn and worsening the existing global learning crisis, in which fewer than half of primary-school-age children in low- and middle-income countries can read a simple story or do basic arithmetic. When schools shut down, education systems need fast, low-cost and flexible ways to keep kids learning. However, rigorous evidence on what actually works during emergencies is rare.
Mobile phones have permeated into most nooks and crannies of the world where humans reside, leading researchers to explore them as a tool for reaching primary school children during emergencies. Wherever there are mobile phones, people can connect via text messages and phone calls, which might feel less efficient than the internet, but more than 70% of households in low-income countries have the former and only 15% have the latter. To find out whether a single mobile-phone-based emergency education strategy could work in different parts of the world, researchers needed a coordinated, multicountry trial.
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