Rural Teacher Network in Madagascar
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The Rural Teacher Network is an innovative, scalable, cost-efficient program which we will begin rolling out in 2012. At the end of the first stage of the project, in 2014, we hope to have reached between 800-1000 rural teachers and approximately 80,000 students.
The Rural Teacher Network will be the first program to in Madagascar that addresses the issue of teacher training in rural schools. Teachers in Madagascar are typically undertrained, and in the case of rural educators, there is little support from regional or national agencies. For this project, we will be connecting between 800-1000 teachers to urban mentors using cell phones; yes, even in rural Malagasy villages there is often now cell phone service! |
This initiative will also incentivize both teaching AND participation by using transferable cell phone credit as a method of payment for commitment to the training and for increases in student learning as the teacher progresses through the year-long training. To our knowledge, we are the first organization to incentivize using cell phone credit - it's a great way to minimize costly visits to rural villages and takes out the middle man.
Finally, this fantastic project will be the first project to collect baseline data from northern, rural schools in Madagascar - this means that our data will allow people to see whether students are actually learning in rural Madagascar, for the first time ever! In addition, we will be working with teachers to collect year-round data sets will be used to analyze the success of the program, and given to other NGOs and government authorities for planning purposes.
We are accepting donations to kick-start this program - the expected minimum budget is $100,000 although we are grant writing to fund a larger, $300,000 program. The impact of this project will be 800-1000 teachers and approximately ~80,000 students in northern Madagascar.
Finally, this fantastic project will be the first project to collect baseline data from northern, rural schools in Madagascar - this means that our data will allow people to see whether students are actually learning in rural Madagascar, for the first time ever! In addition, we will be working with teachers to collect year-round data sets will be used to analyze the success of the program, and given to other NGOs and government authorities for planning purposes.
We are accepting donations to kick-start this program - the expected minimum budget is $100,000 although we are grant writing to fund a larger, $300,000 program. The impact of this project will be 800-1000 teachers and approximately ~80,000 students in northern Madagascar.
Donate to help fund this project here!
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To read the strategic plan for this project, please download the PDF (left):
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