Mobile Phones for Literacy, "Project ABC"

Mobile Phones as a Literacy Platform in Niger

Mobile phones have been heralded as a poverty reduction tool – and for good reason. Across rural-urban and rich-poor divides, they connect people to people, to information, to markets, and to financial services. As one largely overlooked benefit, mobile phones may achieve for pennies what governments have spent millions trying to do: teach people to read. The spread of mobile phones in poor countries and their ability to leapfrog infrastructure-intensive landlines is well established. Less appreciated is how the difference in price between expensive talking and cheap short message services (SMS) – the worldwide norm in mobile pricing – is likely to affect this growing pool of poor subscribers. This price differential provides an immediate and powerful incentive for the illiterate poor to learn to text.

The Mobile Phones for Literacy Project, a joint project between UC Berkeley and UC Davis, aims to explore how relatively cheap SMS can be used to turn mobile phones into an adult literacy platform in Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world. The results of the project will suggest follow-on research ideas to explore the social benefits of more innovative mobile phone pricing structures that further favor SMS among poor, illiterate populations.

Principal Investigator: Travis J. Lybbert, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Davis; Jenny Aker, Economics Department and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Field Location: Niger
Partners: Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS); Catholic Relief Services