When Europe Meets Africa

Story by Sun-Min Kim, Intern at Tostan France, Paris

October 6 – I am standing in front of the Satellit Café, a world music bar in the 10th district of Paris, waiting for the rest of the Tostan France team to arrive. I started interning at Tostan France in June, and today, I will have a chance to be part of an off-site event. Volker Goetze, a German friend of the organization, is performing tonight with his Senegalese partner and fellow musician Ablaye Cissoko, and he invited Tostan France to come and present its activities during the break.

Volker plays the trumpet, Ablaye plays the African string instrument the kora, and together they perform jazz music. While I am trying to picture how two such different instruments could fuse into jazz, everybody begins to arrive; that is, the three regular members of the Tostan France office, Sabine, Marine, and Seydou, two volunteers Eric and Makhoudia, two friends of the organization, and Gannon who is visiting us from the Tostan DC office.

Established in Paris in 2007, the Tostan France office was born out of the need to involve members of the African diaspora in the development process in their communities of origin. Through years of experience in Senegal and other African countries, Tostan has learned that members of the diaspora are influential forces that can either hinder or fuel social development. Development in African villages is only sustainable when the diaspora communities are involved in the decision-making process. Tostan France therefore meets the crucial need of maintaining an on-going dialogue between those who have emigrated and those who have not.

Study Shows Promise for Innovative "Text Messaging for Literacy" Approach in Africa

DAKAR, Senegal September 8, 2010

On International Literacy Day, Tostan, along with partners UNICEF and the Center of Evaluation for Global Action (CEGA) at the University of California, Berkeley, have released initial findings of an evaluation that shows great promise for using text messaging as a means for improving literacy and community development.

The evaluation centered on a pilot of the Jokko Initiative, which was implemented in 25 villages in the Velingara region of Senegal, bringing innovative mobile technology education to 800 program participants. These villages were already engaged in Tostan's Community Empowerment Program (CEP), a 30-month holistic education program covering human rights, democracy, health and hygiene, problem solving, literacy, and numeracy.

Focusing on improving communication and reinforcing literacy during and after the CEP, the Jokko Initiative teaches participants to use cell phones and send text messages in local languages. It is designed to give participants a vital literacy practice tool and enable them to better reach out to their communities and social networks.

According to the evaluation conducted by CEGA in these villages, women and girls, who had the lowest rates of literacy and numeracy before the Jokko Initiative began, greatly improved over the course of the project. The percentage of women and girls who scored in the highest category for literacy and numeracy increased from 12% for women and 8% for girls at the baseline, to 29% and 33% at the follow-up. Moreover, the number of participants who were able to write a text message jumped from 8% to 62%.

To power the text message system, UNICEF contributed knowledge and expertise around the RapidSMS tool--a free and open-source framework for interacting with mobile phones. Much of the RapidSMS framework has been built and tested with users in sub-Saharan Africa.

During the evaluation, two rounds of data collection took place: a baseline and a second round after the first four months of Tostan's literacy and numeracy training. At the outset of the program, only 22% of the participants--the majority whom are women--reported being literate. Only 18% reported having any formal schooling. CEGA's research shows that after the four months, both literacy and numeracy increased substantially.

"While more research needs to be done to identify how best to harness cell phones in promoting literacy--the results from the pilot study are promising as they show that teaching people how to read and write messages on a cell phone can be a positive addition to a successful literacy program," says Theresa Beltramo, Economist and Evaluation Coordinator for CEGA.

Molly Melching, Executive Director of Tostan, said that this program, in her opinion, has incredible potential. "For years we have been looking for ways to address the challenge of making literacy relevant, finding ways for participants to practice their new skills, all the while engaging women and girls in the process and reinforcing existing social ties. This project does all of these things."


Today, International Literacy Day, is an occasion to celebrate these women in Senegal as well as women the world over who empower themselves and their communities through education and literacy.


Find more information about RapidSMS on their website www.rapidsms.org. To read more about the Jokko Initiative, visit www.tostan.org or follow the blog http://www.jokkoinitiative.org/.

Jokko Initiative Project Manager Blogs on Social Change and Mobile Technology

Jokko Initiative Project Manager Blogs on Social Change and Mobile Technology

The Jokko Initiative is a collaborative effort between Tostan, UNICEF, and many African communities to empower participants through mobile technology education. Guillaume Debar, the Jokko Initiative project manager, blogs about mobile technology and social change. SMS text messaging offers an innovative way for NGOs to address a common problem – maintenance of literacy skills post-program participation – because it serves as a practical, desirable application of participants’ skills. In other words, SMS text messaging is an inexpensive way for villagers to communicate with family and friends about news and community events, allowing for both the use newfound literary skills and an effective way of organizing community events: an essential part of long-lasting social change. Click here to read more from Guillaume Debar.

Africa-Middle East Microcredit Summit

Cody Donahue, Tostan’s Coordinator of Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning reports from Nairobi, Kenya on the Africa-Middle East Microcredit Summit.

This week, Nairobi is the meeting place for over 2,000 microfinance professionals, NGOs, government officials, and donor organizations dedicated to sharing their experiences and innovations from the world of microfinance and economic empowerment in Africa and the Middle East. I am attending the Africa-Middle East Microcredit Summit with two of my Tostan colleagues, Cheikh Diouf and Aida Mandiang, and have had the immense pleasure of seeing many Tostan friends, partners, and supporters from all around the world!

I’m taking advantage of immersing myself in the amazing community that has gathered here in Nairobi and taking the chance to share with summit delegates what Tostan is all about.

Some of the key messages Tostan is sharing at the summit:
1. When providing financial services to those who are poor and do not have bank accounts, it is important for new clients of microcredit programs and the community as a whole to be prepared with education and training. Tostan’s Community Empowerment Program (CEP) allows individuals to be smart and safe with the loans they take out. Human-rights education, which is the basis of the CEP, is an incredibly important foundation for economic empowerment.
2. Tostan is urging microfinance institutions (MFIs) and donors to promote the connections between MFIs and NGOs working in the community. These organizations provide invaluable training and education, especially in the realms of literacy and new technologies like Tostan’s Jokko Initiative which helps communities to harness the power of SMS messaging.
3. Along with our friends at International Network of Alternative Financial Institutions (INAFI), Tostan and Tostan France are reaching out to the African diaspora and are working to connect immigrants to communities in Africa. In addition, INAFAI is actively working on a solution to facilitate sending remittances from African immigrants in Europe back to Senegalese communities.

On behalf of the entire Tostan delegation, we’d like to thank the partners that helped us get to Nairobi in order to attend this extraordinary event:

Thanks to everyone that made this trip possible!

More exciting news and videos to come!

Tostan’s Jokko Initiative: Empowering Communities through Mobile Technology

By Rebecca Tapscott

THIES, Senegal 19 March 2010 – 30 Tostan facilitators traveled from regions across Senegal in order to attend a four-day Jokko Initiative Training seminar, which began on Tuesday, March 16th in the city of Thiès. The fruit of an innovative partnership between Tostan and UNICEF, the Jokko Intiative uses mobile phones as pedagogical tools to support the Aawde component (literacy, introduction to management, and post-literacy) of Tostan’s Community Empowerment Program (CEP).

The goal of the Jokko Initiative is to empower people to harness the power of accessible mobile technology to improve their lives and those of their children. Mobile phones serve as practical tools for learning and reinforcing literacy and numeracy skills, while offering various applications that are relevant to the daily lives of community members and which allow them to practice the organization and management skills taught in the CEP. Tostan has also seen that SMS texting- a more economical means of communication than a phone call – has the potential to accelerate positive social change, as it provides a platform for exchanging information, broadcasting ideas and organizing community advocacy efforts.

During the training seminar, conducted in Wolof and Pular, the facilitators performed skits, sang, danced, and used illustrations to ready themselves for teaching courses on sending and receiving SMS text messages, registering contacts, and using the calculator function on cell phones, etc.

One of the participatory teaching tools to be used by facilitators (community trainers in Tostanese) to teach CEP participants is an illustration of a mango tree, with each branch representing a different level in the menu of a cell phone. The illustration helps those who are new to the technology to navigate menus and reach their desired application. Facilitators practiced making their way along the branches of a model tree and narrated their journey.

Guillaume Debar, the Jokko Initiative project manager, expressed optimism about the project’s future. “Our pilot in 200 villages in Senegal has showed that project participants see an immediate incentive to learn to read and write, as they use SMS texting to communicate better and at a lower cost. As a result, they are consistently motivated throughout the course of the Aawde, and other community members even applied to join the class.”

To read more about the Jokko Initiative, please click here. Click here to view additional photos and video clips.

Tostan's Jokko Initiative highlighted in The Daily Beast article

Amongst other topics, the Women in the World event held this past weekend discussed the use of powerful new technologies to change the fate of women in developing countries. A few days prior the event, The Daily Beast mentioned ten technologies in particular that have had a successful impact on women’s lives. One of the technologies highlighted was Tostan’s Jokko Initiative, a program that uses text-messages to create a social and educational network, and that has helped communities to further discuss the abandonment of female genital cutting (FGC) and child/forced marriage.

Here is a paragraph of the article “Technologies That Empower Women” by Tom Watson:

10. Connected Communities
When remote villages are interconnected, cultural biases against women can change rapidly. Take the Jokko Initiative in Senegal, named for the word that means "communication" in Wolof, Senegal’s national language. Jokko is a joint project of UNICEF and Tostan, an NGO that has led the movement to abandon female genital-cutting and forced child marriage. The program uses a text message-based social-networking platform to more rapidly "train the trainers," local volunteers who go village to village talking to their peers about “democracy, human rights, problem-solving, hygiene and health, literacy, math, and management," according to Tostan. The result? Less female genital-cutting and child marriage.

To read the full article on The Daily Beast, click here.