Allo Alphabet

With 42% of its population under 14 years of age, Côte d’Ivoire has an opportunity to improve access to quality of education. The number of out-of-school children has steadily decreased in the past 10 years to 240,000 children (including 197,000 girls), yet the literacy rate is stagnant at around 50% for people 15 and older. Literacy rates are poorest in rural areas of the country, where only 14% of sixth-grade students attain sufficient competency in both math and language. Access to quality education in rural communities can be a challenge, particularly when many children are managing the dual demands of school and working on family farms.

In this context, the public authorities have developed ambitious education plans to bring (and retain) children to school even in the most remote parts of the countries. However, learning to read depends not only on having access to education, but on having access to quality education. Age and level differences, learning disabilities, overload of classes, poor equipment and training of educators are all elements hindering literacy development in children.

Ed-Tech tools can thus be useful instruments to complement traditional education, in particular in rural and remote communities. Easy to use, engaging, and cheap Ed-Tech tools, based on equipment that are readily available to families can provide effective support to children in their literacy development. The design of Allo Alphabet is based on previous research on literacy development in rural communities (led by K. Jasinska), and tailored to the rural Ivorian context. Allo Alphabet is (1) designed to be used after-school at home, enabling children who miss school due to agricultural activities to continue to receive literacy instruction and practice, (2) leverages children’s local language knowledge to bootstrap into reading in French by incorporating local language phonological structures, (3) builds phonemic decoding skills in a developmentally-appropriate manner (i.e. following saliency of phonological grain sizes), (4) is adaptive, and (5) provides a voice-based parent access platform accessible to non-literate parents that engages parents in children’s learning.  As shown by recent evidence, the larger effect sizes in programs that implement EdTech are however highly dependent on adult interaction (family or teachers/tutors). It is thus crucial that such Ed-Tech programs encompass the whole family in order to provide children with structure, engagement and support throughout their literacy development.

No existing literacy intervention programs in Côte d’Ivoire currently offer scalable solutions to quickly address the problems of widespread student literacy failures.