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A woman, a mobile phone and an
education: empowerment at her fingertips
Saniye Gülser Corat, Director, Division for Gender Equality, Office of the Director-General; and Elodie Khavarani,
Division for Gender Equality, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
prohibitively expensive for her. Whereas texting was free.
At the age of 40, Rokhaya decided that it was time to learn
how to read and write.
Fortunately, her village was included in UNESCO’s adult
literacy project called
Projet d’Alphabétisation pour les Jeunes
Filles et les Femmes au Sénégal
(PAJEF). She eagerly enrolled
in the programme.
Rokhaya’s class had 30 adult students. She quickly learned
how to write and to do basic arithmetic operations on her
phone as the programme had a phone-centric emphasis. The
courses also included interactive learning through mobile
applications and the use of laptops, beamers, touch pens and
television. Women were provided with information technol-
ogy and vocational skills and attended sessions on developing
income-generating activities.
Women’s lives, like Rokhaya’s, can improve drastically
when they are given access to previously denied education
opportunities and knowledge to make use of modern tech-
nological tools like smartphones and computers. The key
to access is to place all these initiatives within a framework
“
Y
our son got an ‘A’ today in class. Rokhaya.”
This simple news was the equivalent of Alexander
Graham Bell’s “Mary had a little lamb” moment for
Rokhaya, a mother and grandmother hailing from a remote
village in Northern Senegal. These eight words that she
composed on the black and white screen of her second-hand
Nokia phone and sent to her husband in Dakar were the
first thing she ever wrote after completing an adult literacy
programme organized by the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
As is too common in the developing world, Rokhaya
married very young and was not able to attend school as
she needed to look after her growing family. When her
husband found a decent job in Dakar she was left behind
with no way of communicating with him. She thought
she could call him from time to time if she had a phone.
She saved some money and got herself a Nokia from the
village’s telco centre, a shack in the marketplace. But the
first time she called him, she realized that the cost was
Knowledge is the key for life
Teaching literacy in Wolof, Senegal
Image: Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock.com
Image: UNESCO Dakar
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