Every one of you reading this today can understand this simple sentence. However, almost two thirds (59 percent) of children in the Arab world are in ‘learning poverty’—which means they cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text in Arabic by the age of 10. This is a problem for schools and parents across the Arab world, including in high income countries in the Gulf. With two thirds of the Middle East and North Africa’s (MENA) 50 million children in learning poverty, this is an urgent problem that is holding back our region’s development and progress. To succeed in solving this problem, any solution must find ways to (1) modernize outdated teaching practices, (2) close the gap between Modern Standard and spoken Arabic and (3) leverage technology.
How do we translate that to respond to the existing needs of schools in the MENA region? Students need Arabic content that is relevant to their interests and life. They need to feel engaged in the language learning process and they need to feel that they can achieve and that success is within their reach. Meanwhile, teachers are scrambling to find the tools and resources to help them improve how teaching and learning happens. Kamkalima provides support to Arabic teachers in schools across MENA to empower existing curricula with engaging digital content, assessment and insights to drive continuous improvement in learning. We come to schools with the conviction that technology can be effective in assisting learning and improving student outcomes, especially when it is spearheaded by teachers.
The Pandemic Imposes Change
Schools are “late bloomers” in opening up to technology. In the 1920s and 30s, television and later radio were thought to largely replace textbooks in the future. In the mid-80s, the forefather of artificial intelligence, himself an educator, forecasted that the computer would emerge as a key instructional tool. Yet, schools remained hesitant in the integration of technology, until a global pandemic made it imperative.
The Covid-19 pandemic forced 1.4 billion school students out of classrooms and forced schools and teachers to find immediate remote learning solutions. School closures have been substantial– an average of 115 days in lower-middle-income countries according to UNESCO. And just as substantial has been the students’ learning loss. Children have lost up to two years of formal learning. Many are experiencing a regression in their educational advancement. World Bank experts have warned that the biggest side effect of the pandemic will be children’s lost learning, which is estimated at $17 trillion contruction in lifetime earnings for students currently in school.
Reports also show children’s resilience dwindling and a negative impact on mental health. We noticed this in students’ writings. Our AI models run sentiment analysis on students’ writings to help teachers to gauge how students feel about certain topics, processes, and learning experiences. The sentiment analysis automatically clusters student writing and detects sentiment polarity into positive (+1), negative (-1) and neutral (0). Negative sentiments in student writing surged during the Covid-19 lockdown possibly indicating the impact of the global pandemic on student wellbeing. This technology allowed us to respond quickly by introducing targeted content around Covid-19 awareness, prevention, and coping including content around mental health.
The Scramble for Solutions
Demand for digital solutions exploded with the pandemic as schools scrambled for education technology. Three hurdles would stand in the way:
Identifying the right tools: not all edtech is created equal. Technology to improve teaching and learning – which is at the heart of education – is certainly more challenging to adopt than technology to manage timetables and payment gateways. It is more challenging because it requires a paradigm shift from a teacher-centric approach to a student-centric approach. The promise of education technology lies in extending the teachers’ abilities – not replacing them – while helping them to implement and facilitate student-centric learning. What we need to see is learning that is supported by technology, not mechanically mediated by it. Technology will never replace teachers, but teachers who use technology will probably replace those who don’t.
Teacher Readiness: Teacher capacity is the wind beneath the wings of successful integration of education technology, and schools need to prioritize professional development programmes. Capacity building cannot be seen as an extra, something that teachers have to make time for on their own or spend on individually. Digital literacy is a must. Every teacher today needs the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to support effective hybrid models of teaching and learning.
Change takes time: It is easy to forget that change takes time when we live in the era of fast food, drive-thrus, diet pills, and instant messages. Change at the school level is imperative for education to remain relevant. Students change, jobs change, and the skills required for success change. Technology can now help teachers gain deeper insights into student learning and teach more effectively. With the advancements in data science, teachers can now gain deeper insight into student learning, better understand learning gaps and match learning resources and activities to student’s needs.
Schools are beginning to change. Schools that would never have considered an online meeting three years ago are now comfortable with the idea. Teacher training sessions that could only be delivered in person to a few teachers in a single school are now delivered remotely as well as in person, synchronously and asynchronously, to support hundreds of teachers across the Arab World.
Championing Schools in Lebanon
As we know, the education sector has not been exempt to the country’s breakdown amid the economic crisis. It has created huge challenges for schooling; from remote learning experiences, to shortages in resources, to teacher migration and children dropping out. The crisis has also led to a decline in the quality of education, with many teachers leaving the profession due to low salaries and poor working conditions. As a result, students in Lebanon are facing increasing difficulties in accessing quality education, which could have long-term impacts on their future prospects.
In 2020-21, students in Lebanon lost more than 5.5 months or 22 weeks of school, equivalent to ⅔ of an academic year, according to UNESCO, with some reports estimating over 1.2 million school-aged children in Lebanon did not receive proper education that year. Meanwhile, during that same year, Kamkalima witnessed 133,000 educational activities from teachers and students in Lebanon. Edtech solutions are not a replacement for school; however, they can provide learning continuity as well as contribute to maintaining a sense of normalcy for students and teachers struggling to cope with frequent disruptions and challenging circumstances.
However, in order to harness the power of technology equitably for all learners, we need “all hands on board” and we need to work together. We invite the educational community to continue to pilot and evaluate the use of digital technologies, such as Kamkalima, among others in challenging contexts like Lebanon, adding to the bank of knowledge about digital education. All stakeholders must prioritize investing in teacher’s digital skills and their readiness to use digital alternatives to promote remote learning. The Lebanese government’s role in providing sustainable infrastructure for electricity and connectivity must be a priority.
As Kamkalima, we continue to support learning recovery in Lebanon in more ways than one. Between 2019-22, we have supported over 24,000 teachers and students in public and private schools across the country with free access to quality tools and resources. In addition, our entreprise supports young Lebanese university students with multiple work-based learning opportunities, including training and internships. Over the past few years, we have hosted more than 30 young people in fields of technology, languages, design, psychology, business and communication arts, helping 65 percent of them to successfully transition into employment in Lebanon and abroad.
The 2021 joint-report by the World Bank, UNICEF and UNESCO ‘The State of the Global Education Crisis: A Path to Recovery’ showed that in low- and middle-income countries, like Lebanon, the share of children living in Learning Poverty – already high before the pandemic – could potentially reach 70 percent given the long school closures and the ineffectiveness of remote learning to ensure full learning continuity during school closures.
We always like to evaluate what we do in the hope that we learn and improve. In September 2022, at the end of a three month internship, Kamkalima asked our youngest colleagues to reflect on their learning experience. For Dana, an MA Student in Comparative Literature, “learning about concepts like ‘inquiry- mindedness’ and ‘social-emotional learning’ has been invaluable.” Aya Catherina Elias feels she was able to “take a glimpse into the future,” by working on real-life projects that build on theoretical concepts learnt in class: “I can see what it’s like to be a researcher and practitioner in my field (psychology).” Youmna and Nour are aspiring female data scientists who consider that the most important thing they learnt was to challenge themselves and believe in their capacity.
In the midst of challenging times in Lebanon, we continue to find hope in each other.
Nisrine El Makkouk is the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Kamkalima
