Policies

Using Smartphone for Education Service delivery

Context and Issue

In the past decade, Haiti has significantly improved access to education, with 90% of primary school-aged children now enrolled. Many schools are privately operated, often by foundations or religious organizations. Although the government does not directly administer these private schools, the Ministry of Education assigns inspectors to oversee public and private institutions. However, inspections are irregular due to challenges such as poor road infrastructure, limited transportation resources, and heavy workloads for inspectors, who typically oversee about 35 schools each.

Solution

The Ministry of Education sought to enhance its school monitoring procedures, prompting collaboration with a World Bank-led team to develop a pilot project to test the effectiveness of technology-driven "virtual" inspections. Haiti was chosen for this initiative due to its widespread mobile phone usage, with nearly 70 cell phones per 100 individuals. The objective was to utilize technology to supplement traditional inspections by enabling remote monitoring, simplifying the process for the education ministry, and providing school directors with clear attendance data for their teachers.

Impact

The program's implementation for only four months and limited utilization of the technology contributed to the lack of improvement in students' test scores, which was expected. Similarly, management practices such as record-keeping remained unchanged, likely due to the low adoption of the technology among schools. Additionally, the program did not affect reducing teacher absenteeism.

Analysis

The evaluation revealed a valuable insight: situations are often more intricate than they appear at first glance. Introducing new technology proved more complicated than anticipated for school directors and inspectors. Similarly, teacher absenteeism was not as prevalent as initially believed. Surveys conducted for the evaluation indicated that absentee rates typically ranged between 5% to 10%, which is relatively low compared to other low-income countries.