Reflecting on Video: Exploring the Efficacy of Video for Teaching Device Literacy in Rural Kenya

This publication examines the effectiveness of video for digital literacy education initiatives. The approach described here is similar to to illuminAid’s video intervention and prior projects in the education sector.

illuminAid claims no authorship of this publication and takes no ownership over the subject of this study’s research. Please see citation below.

Abstract

Substantial interest is focused on using video to disseminate agricultural information to rural farmers in the developing world. This paper explores the effectiveness of using this approach to improve rural farmers’ device literacy—that is, their ability to use mobile phones for purposes other than making and receiving voice calls. Findings from our pilot evaluation, conducted with women farmers in rural western Kenya, suggest that videos combined with facilitators can be useful for improving women’s confidence in sending text messages, using ‘m-agriculture’ applications, unsubscribing from services that deduct their mobile phone airtime, and, in general, increasing their awareness of the mobile Internet and its related services (i.e., Facebook and Google). More significantly, our findings also reveal underexplored issues that hinder women’s mobile phone use: in particular, their concerns about losing money to Safaricom (Kenya’s dominant mobile network provider), and the challenges that result from a wide variety of mobile phone screen interfaces. These findings encourage ICTD researchers and practitioners to pay greater attention to corporate power structures affecting mobile phone use, to recognize that rural farmers’ information needs encompass more than just agricultural material, and to raise questions about scalability of instructional video.

Citation

Susan Wyche, Charles Steinfield, Tian Cai, Nightingale Simiyu, and Martha E. Othieno. 2016. Reflecting on Video: Exploring the Efficacy of Video for Teaching Device Literacy in Rural Kenya. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 8, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/2909609.2909667
Images from a 2020 illuminAid project with Africare which to empowered staff to create and disseminate videos related to nutrition and livelhoods for women and youth in Lodwar, Kenya.
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Impact of Low-Cost, On-demand, Information Access in a Remote Ghanaian Village