Project Type

Facts & Figures

LOCATIONS GLOBALLY

Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Rwanda

REGIONS IN CÔTE D’IVOIRE

All across the country

TIMELINE

Since 2017

TARGETED POPULATION

  • University students
  • Rural youth
  • K–12 teachers
  • School proprietors
  • Rural health workers

DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS

Mobile (online and offline)

MILESTONES/KEY OUTCOMES

  • Over 10,000 direct beneficiaries in 3 African countries
  • A bilingual team of 12 technology and education experts

Partners & clients

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About the project

Chalkboard Education, a for-profit education technology company, aims at bridging the skills gap in Africa by maximizing the reach and impact of existing training organizations and initiatives with inclusive and adapted mobile technologies. Chalkboard Education provides the technological framework, allowing organizations and institutions to amplify their impact through the launch of their own mobile training programs.

Challenge

200 million young people across the African continent are in need of skills and training, and this figure is expected to double by 2040. Yet African institutions are already far outnumbered by needs; they do not have the resources to accommodate this young surge.

Solution

Chalkboard Education harnesses mobile technologies as a scalable and affordable solution for all institutions and organizations across the continent while also ensuring high quality and efficient content of the mobile-based programs. Chalkboard Education’s distribution platform developed an inclusive approach to maximize both the reach and the impact of training and teaching programs. This allows actors in the education and training industry to make their existing content mobile-friendly or easily develop new e-learning curricula.

The platform is ideal for rural settings, as it works on all devices and offline. Chalkboard Education also offers a range of services to assist its partners with managing their transition to a digital environment, such as content digitization, instructional design, and asynchronous analytics to ease and automatize impact measurement.

Results to date

Chalkboard Education has served a variety of customers, from non-profits to universities and schools. Training programs serve a few dozen to multiple thousands of trainees.

The company’s success stories include training NGO workers and affiliates on child safeguarding in cocoa-producing communities of Côte d’Ivoire, training healthcare professionals on child nutrition in rural Rwanda, and training primary school teachers all across Ghana.

Already based on cutting-edge technology and standards, Chalkboard Education is now investing in artificial intelligence applied to education (adaptive learning, instructional design, etc.) and expects to release its first prototypes in 2021.

Scientific evidence

An external audit on the relevancy of mobile technologies in training and education revealed that the Chalkboard Education approach is an opportunity to scale up more interactive and personalized pedagogies. Mobile training in particular, when personalized and tailored to its target, can help trainees go from a “knowledge” stage to an “application” or “synthesis” stage at a large scale.

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