The government of Sierra Leone has deployed an innovative mobile-based application that places a dictionary in the hands of every Sierra Leonean. Any citizen, with the push of a button on any kind of mobile phone, can receive a text message with the meaning of any word they search for. They can also sign up for a ‘word of the day’ service, which sends a daily text message to their phone with a new random word in the dictionary and its definition. This solution seeks to support literacy improvements in learners and citizens across the country at no cost to the users.

When COVID-19 forced schools to close in 2020, 1.6 billion children around the world were directly impacted. Out of these, 2.6 million children who stayed at home and had their learning affected were in Sierra Leone. Global education research institutions have urged countries to innovate or risk reversing the gains made towards the achievement of SDG 4 on universal education and learning.

Jumping into action at the start of the pandemic

At the same time that the government of Sierra Leone locked classroom doors in March 2020, the Ministry of Basic Senior Secondary Education (MBSSE) received a Global Partnership of Education (GPE) Emergency Response Planning Grant of US$70,000 through the UNICEF country office in Sierra Leone. The grant was committed to support the ministry with its planning and response to the emerging pandemic.

The MBSSE quickly established an Emergency Education Taskforce consisting of four pillars: Communications; Continuous Distance Learning; School Reopening Readiness; and Operations, Policy and Planning, all geared towards reducing the country’s education poverty.

In January 2021, the MBSSE launched the SMS 8447 / USSD *8447# mobile application in partnership with UNICEF Sierra Leone, all the major telecommunication companies and a local start-up called Digitallé. Digitallé worked closely with the ministry on the continuous learning outputs to develop the concept of value-added services that allow mobile phone users to search for the meaning of words at any time and anywhere using ubiquitous SMS and USSD technologies.

Solutions adapted to our context

While several countries focused on developing e-learning services that rely on high bandwidth connectivity and data, the context in Sierra Leone is different. Coverage rates of 2G voice/text mobile and 3G/4G data access in Sierra Leone are approximately 85% and 20% respectively. Furthermore, the majority of cellphone devices available to the population are simple feature phones and not smart phones. These realities informed the solution development that covers a majority of the population.

Two weeks after an initial soft launch of the application, there have been over 2,500 word searches, with top 10 searches including “education”, “love”, “man”, “sex”, “innovation”, “noun”, “money”, “school”, “government” and “constitution”. So far, 259 citizens have subscribed to the ‘word of the day’ SMS messages, which arrive at 7am daily. Citizens can select one of three literacy levels for ‘word of the day’: primary school, secondary school and advanced level. This is an encouraging start. With the help of our partners, we will conduct community engagements so that the service, which is freely available to all citizens, contributes to improving literacy throughout the country.

Among several deliverables, the $70,000 GPE grant was also used to monitor activities during the school reopening five months after they closed, and to evaluate the Radio Teaching Program, which was critical during the school closure. Community engagement, focus group discussion, and support for the training of trainers in 16 districts on safe school protocols were also supported.

A second GPE grant of $7 million is also currently supporting our COVID-19 education response plan.