A New Educational Mobile Devices Platform for Social Inclusion in Tanzania

Abstract

Abstract-It is evident that advances in technology has led to improvement in societal wellbeing. In this paper we demonstrate how mobile phones are used in providing reliable and quality education to students in disadvantaged areas of Tanzania. The main contribution is on leveraging on the success that Tanzania has had on using mobile banking to the un-banked population. These lessons are adapted to the education sector, where clever/smart integration of existing disruptive technologies such as mobile phones and social networks are be used to provide access to high quality educational contents. Further, the paper shows how educational content can be localized/adopted with a view of empowering teachers and the educational needs of students. The central piece of the proposed system is the ability to add, share and reduce the amount of redundancy. Finally, we report on the implementation of the system in a community project in rural Tanzania Keywords-social inclusion; educational platform, disruptive technologies, social networks, national research networks, mobile network operator;