20 August 2013

How many kids attended school in South Sudan today?

You'll soon be able to find out online from live SMS reports, currently being piloted in Lainya County near Juba (1,319 girls and 1,507 boys reported present so far today in case you were wondering, 84 girls absent and 136 boys absent), with plans to roll out to the whole country. Data is reported by state, county, and even by school. As CG says, "South Sudan may not be at the top on most things, but on SMS real time school attendance monitoring, we think we may actually be leading the world." Ana Fii Inni (I am here!) is a South Sudan Ministry of Education project being supported by the DFID Girl's Education Programme.

Unrelated, I'm also told that it is possible to procure schools through the church in South Sudan for half of the $30,400 figure reported here.

1 comment:

Joel Selanikio said...

This looks like a great program, congratulations! Are there any figures available for program costs, both in technology and in consultants and technicians? That would be important to know if this success is to be replicated.

As an example, another great school monitoring program, currently scaled to five sub-Saharan African countries, is run by Camfed (www.camfed.org), and powered by the Magpi mobile data collection system (www.magpi.com). And the full five-country program only costs about $12000 per year for all countries combined -- no consultants or programmers or technicians required. While Camfed's system is based on "feature phones" (basic Nokias), Magpi also allows SMS or smartphone data submission. Best of all, an SMS based system can be set up in just minutes. Read more in this great case study: http://bit.ly/156tShe

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