Digital nomads & basic education in northern Kenya

In Digital Development Debates Issue 14 (March 2015) of the Development Policy Forum of GIZ (German Agency for International Cooperation), the article “The real digital nomads”, by Uli Schwarz and Petra Dilthey, describes an e-learning programme called Ethno E-Empowerment among mobile Rendille, Samburu and Turkana pastoralists in northern Kenya. The pastoralists’ everyday lives – in the camps, on the rangeland, at the markets – are documented in short video sequences and photos in order to develop eBooks with exercises for reading, writing and arithmetic for pastoralists wanting to become literate. “Barefoot” local teachers are the multipliers, using tablets with solar chargers. The digital teaching with true-to-life learning content appears to be attractive to the pastoralists and could offer an appropriate path for basic formal education, combining a mobile lifestyle with modern technologies.

A 2017 blog report from the field about this work “True to life multimedia learning for pastoralists” also offers some video examples of the tailor-made learning.

Posted on 20 July 2017 in Pastoralism & Services, Pastoralism, Mobility & Land Tenure