Advanced Search

The story appears on

Page A6

April 26, 2010

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Opinion » Foreign Views

Linking kids worldwide with IT, mobile phones

By Jeffrey D. Sachs | April 26, 2010, Monday | Print Edition

THE information-and-communications-technology revolution is surely the most powerful single force for economic development in the world today.

It is not just in New York, Shanghai, or Paris that one finds a mobile telephone in the hands of each passerby. These days, one finds mobile phones in Nairobi taxis and among camel-herders in northern Kenya.

There are now 4.6 billion mobile subscribers, and the numbers are soaring. An estimated 250 million subscribers live in Sub-Saharan Africa alone.

The spread of 3G (and soon 4G) offers the prospect of a technological breakthrough in education. Suddenly, even remote schools can connect to the Internet and to other schools through a solar panel, low-cost computers, and wireless access. A school that lacked even rudimentary supplies suddenly can have access to the same global store of information as any other place in the world.

When this happens, the results are galvanizing. Within minutes of going online in a pastoralist community in northeast Kenya, kids were reading about their own community as part of the Africa-wide Millennium Villages Project.

Communities that had little school attendance have seen kids stream in as low-cost interventions, starting with Internet connectivity, in-school meals, and a safe water supply, lead to a surge in schools' quality, performance, and attractiveness to students and parents.

With modest up-front financing, impoverished rural communities that had not considered educating girls suddenly see the immense value to the community of educating both boys and girls.

In a Millennium Village in Ethiopia that I recently visited with the country's health minister, a local father explained to me how he had decided to keep his daughter in school rather than marrying her at age 12 to a neighbor's son.

"I asked my daughter what she wanted to do," the father explained, "and she told me that she wants to stay in school, so she is continuing in school."

The health minister turned to me and said that he had never before heard such a conversation in that region: that the father would not only ask the daughter, but happily heed her decision. We are seeing such rapid changes throughout Africa. Impoverished communities are cheering the prospect of a rapid ramp-up in girls' education, if meager resources permit.

Universal secondary education, especially for girls, is transformative for societies attempting to escape poverty, because education changes the demographic dynamics of the country as well.

In the poorest parts of the world where girls are still not in secondary school, they are married at a young age and have six to eight children on average.

Those who stay in school end up marrying much later, perhaps in their early to mid-twenties, entering the workforce, and having two to three children.

The interplay of voluntary fertility reduction and declining poverty are profound and rapid. When poor families have fewer children, they can afford to invest more per child in health, nutrition, and schooling. Mothers can spend more time in the job market, breaking long-standing barriers of gender inequality.

Reduced population growth means less pressure on land, water, and biodiversity. In short, the links between education and reduced fertility, faster economic development, and lower environmental degradation are too powerful and obvious to be ignored.

Connecting kids around the world in shared on-line curricula, and facilitating "social networks" of kids around the world at an early age, will yield far-reaching educational benefits.

At a recent launch of a "school-to-school" link connecting an elementary school in the US with one in Kenya, young children across an 8,000-mile divide shared a "read-aloud," and then reflected in amazement and delight that they could share a story with kids in another part of the world.

Current estimates suggest that about 300 million school-age children worldwide are deprived of the chance to complete secondary school. That deficit, which threatens the futures of these kids and their societies, can now be closed at low cost.

A Global Fund for Education, combined with a global voluntary effort to connect kids around the world, offers the chance for a breakthrough that was not realistic even a few years ago.

Such initiatives are another dramatic example of a basic truth of our time: extreme poverty, illiteracy, and death from preventable diseases are anachronistic scourges when we have the technologies and global goodwill to end them.

(The author is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The views are his own. Shanghai Daily condensed his article. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.www.project-syndicate.org)

Foreign Views


 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend