Report: Mobile Devices Can Significantly Increase the Education Standards in Developing Countries
According to the reports from UNESCO, the literacy rates can be increased significantly in the developing countries with the aid of mobile devices. The education can be provided to nearly the whole world with the aid of mobile devices. For this purpose, the people don’t have to buy the expensive tablets or smartphones. They can use feature phones for reading e-books.
The report was based on the survey carried on 5000 people carried out in Ethiopia, Ghana, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, India, and Zimbabwe. They noticed that they areas contain plentiful of mobile devices whereas the existence of physical books is lacking clearly. Although, mobile is still mostly used for the communication purposes, yet the cheapest mobile phone supports long texts also. This report was created in collaboration with Nokia that is still spending most of its business on featurephones, as well as Worldreader that is a free mobile reading platform that targets the markets in Africa and Asia.
The report contained the statistics of the people who are using mobile phones. The report tells their number to be 6 billion. It simply means that such a huge population of the developing world has access to the great source of reading material.
The results of the survey revealed 18% respondents who claimed that the cost of the data is a matter of concern for them when they try to access the reading material through their network. However, 50% of them said that data rates are immaterial for them.
The main barrier in the path of the education online is the lack of interesting content availability. This was the opinion of the 60% respondents. The popular search terms were not related to education, and were mostly revolved around the topics as Romeo and Juliet, Harry Potter, Animal Farm, and Twilight.
The reports also revealed that mobiles are conducive to learning for women and girls more than boys and men. They seem to take advantage of mobile more in this regard. Although, 77% users of the mobile are still male, but women spend more time reading, the stats show that they spend 207 minutes per month reading the text on mobiles. Men only spend 33 minutes per month. One third of the parents surveyed, said that they are used to read the texts from their children regularly.
Hence, mobile devices can be valuable sources of information for the people in developing countries.
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