ICTs in Rural Kenya; Concerns from Teachers.
In June 2022, I spent sometime with students, teachers and parents in Oduwo village in Western Kenya, courtesy of Mandela Washington Reciprocal Exchange program, trying to understand underlying concerns and motivation on ICTs. This blog series, ICTs in rural Kenya, tries to capture the experience. The first part focuses on concerns from teachers, then second part on cares from parents and students. Lastly, third part on lessons drawn from the community.
The idea that ICTs can transform learning and teaching in schools has featured in prominent debates among technology developers, policymakers, development partners and governments across the globe.
Kenya has been at the forefront of exploring digital education to transform its education system.
In 2012, the Government of Kenya (GoK) through its Jubilee manifesto promised every child in their first year of basic education (Standard One) a laptop. That gave birth to the Digital Learning Program (DLP) branded as Digi schools but popularly known as the Laptop program. The DLP was officially launched in 2016 and distributed over a million devices to 24,000 primary schools across the country at a cost of 70 billion Kenyan shillings. The latest statistics show that 90% of all primary schools in Kenya received digital devices.
More to it, in 2017 the Government of Kenya introduced the Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) to replace the 8–4–4 education system that served the country for over 32 years. CBC is heavily anchored on innovation and technology, with the majority of class activities requiring the use of digital devices or the internet.
However, despite these efforts and investments in ICTs, the usage of ICTs in schools in Kenya is low. A case in point, It is only less than 5% of public schools in Kenya who received devices from the the digital learning program who actually use them.
To understand the root cause of the low utilization of ICTs in rural schools in Kenya, we conducted ICTs and design thinking training targeting teachers in Oduwo village, Muhoroni sub-county, Kisumu county in Western Kenya.
Matters of concern.
But, before teaching the teachers on “the how ‘’ of ICTs, we firstly took time to listen to their cares and fears on ICTs. This is what we heard teachers saying:-
“ICT is hard and complicated”
Most teachers attributed ICTs to making their life harder and more miserable. This is essentially triggered by the number of platforms and applications they have to access to comply with government directives or be seen as “ICT Savvy”. We found a typical teacher in Kenya might require access to up to 10 platforms to be “ICT compliant”. These platforms include
- TPay — for teachers’ payslips and payment information
- TPad — for teachers’ appraisal and professional development
- Tmis — this is the teachers’ information management system
- Nemis — for teachers to upload students’ information.
- Knec — teachers have to upload students’ assessments and results
- In addition to compulsory platforms such as taxes, insurance and optional personal apps like savings.
You can only picture how this works out for teachers in rural areas with limited internet and skills on how to access and use the internet and digital platforms.
“ICT is expensive”
The majority of teachers had to use personal monetary resources to either access and use ICTs. For instance, because they do not know how to use computers and the internet, they have to search for cyber cafes to get help from cyber cafe assistants. Most cyber cafes are located in urban centres away from the villages and that means a commute which costs around Kshs. 200 ($2). They then pay an average of Kshs. 200 ($2) for an hour’s use of a cyber cafe and service charge. That means a day’s trip to use a cyber cafe would cost a teacher Kshs. 500 ($5) for transport, cyber cafe charge and a meal.
Several trips a month may be required to fulfill all the work that demands the use of ICTs. More to it, if not going to cyber cafes, rural teachers use their “IT savvy” colleagues to get the work done. We found out that the IT savvy teachers are spending up to Kshs. 2,000 ($20), mostly in the form of internet bundles to help less IT savvy teachers to access and use digital platforms.
The salary of a teacher in Kenya is approx Kshs. 27,000 ($270) per month, and recent survey shows Kenyans spend Kshs. 5000 on essential shopping including food every month. That means, ICTs is taking away almost half of the basic spending of teachers.
“ICT will embarrass you”
It was clear that most teachers do not feel confident and comfortable using or exploring ICTs in classrooms. Part of the reason is most teachers are afraid of using technology because they fear technology will fail and they do not have the expertise to fix the problem or have alternatives. Teachers reported cases of students laughing at them when they could not start a projector after a power black outrage. To avoid embarrassment teachers are avoiding anything dealing with ICTs because they do not want to look clueless, helpless and out of control in front of students when ICTs fail.
“ICT is not for people like us”
There was tension between the younger and older generation of teachers. The older expected the younger to know everything about ICTs while the younger expected the older to learn “quicker” and catch up with them. The majority of the younger teachers, most in their 20s, had learned a bit of ICTs literacy in teachers training college, unlike the older teachers, most in their 40s and 50s who had little or no ICT skills. More to learn the skills, the older teachers also struggle with why they had to learn new skills when they can just ask their younger “sons and daughters” to do it for them.
Also, tension existed between teachers and students. A good number of older teachers felt that today’s school going generation, commonly referring to them as “Tiktok generation” , already knew a lot about the use of technology. The teachers were of the view that they therefore were not skilled enough to offer students more than they already know. Additionally, teachers felt that it was up to “this” generation to deal with their own “things” including learning and living with technology. Simply put, ICTs was never made for people like them.
“ICT is all about compliance”
We noted that most teachers’ primary motivation for using ICTs was to comply with government regulations. ICTs compliance was done for job security, to avoid termination or missing out on promotions, as the government issued threats and ultimatums for non-compliance. Learning how to use ICTs to improve teaching was but a secondary motivation.
One of the teachers we met had worked in the same position for the last 20 years and despite putting effort to get a promotion in the last round of interviews, they failed because they didn’t have an ICT certificate to prove that they were ICT literate. The teacher is set to retire in the next one year, meaning that there is a bleak chance in getting a promotion or ICT compliance.
