(by Isabelle Duston)
After numerous attempts to conduct global projects with ICT to address the issue of education in the developing nations, the trend is now to help developing nations create local solutions to better meet local needs.
My belief is that these two approaches do not address the issues of sustainability and scalability in a satisfactory way. Neither of them survive when funds are removed, when technologies evolve, or when adaptations to, or the implementation of, other context is required.
I firmly believe that it is possible to think globally and act locally, while imagining an alternative to a local or a global approach. Elaborating a strategy, which can insure sustainability and scalability, will require international collaboration to create a model, which can be adapted to a local context — especially in terms of linguistics, technology, and distribution.
When we speak of sustainability, we need to address the following aspects:
- Will the application survive with no external funding?
- How will the application adapt to the evolution of technology?
- Will the local population embrace it?
- How can we ensure the deployment and the promotion?
- How can we ensure accessibility by most people?
Our global approach to sustainability:
- The application will be sold for high-end phones, and remain free or at a minimal cost for lower-end phones and web-based versions, therefore bringing us revenue to support operational cost.
- To enable a worldwide deployment, we chose a universal design approach that helps us to reduce the cost of development while allowin g us to focus on key localization aspects.
- The development of the application is currently centralized to ensure technical evolution.
Our local approach to sustainability:
- The educational content is developed exclusively with reading specialists, linguists, teachers and writers who are native speakers of the specific language, to make sure it is locally relevant.
- The distribution model is local. We are building partnerships with local participants; we believe that social entrepreneurs could become strategic stakeholders.
Because of our global approach and the participation of a truly diverse multicultural team, we believe that our solution will be scalable. However, we are aware that the real challenge is local – not so much in developing local content, but in finding a solution suitable in terms of technology and affordability to a local context. We believe that we need to invent a distribution and promotion model involving local social entrepreneurs, operators and local authority. Working together to find the right balance between global generalization and local specificity is the key to sustainability.
Recently, I enjoyed reading the Michael Trucano’s Blog post on What Sesame Street Can Teach the World Bank, and I agree that there is a lot to learn from a show that has had 40 years of experience and international success. Their strategy has been to try and use a broad, global Sesame Street concept and vision, while localizing the content. Local entities have their own specificities, their own business models, and sometimes their own characters. However, regardless of where in the world the company is reaching, it always follows the same mission: “To use the educational power of media to help children everywhere reach their highest potential.”
“Life is about the people you meet and the things you create with them”
We are happy to announce that iLearn4Free will be traveling to Paris in December to participate in the 
