Solar MP3 players to educate Zambian children

We’ve started 2016 with some exciting developments on our “Solar MP3 players to educate Zambian children” project. When we began working on this high impact initiative more than 12 years ago, the Learning at Taonga Market radio lessons were envisaged as a viable solution for children living in rural areas, with either no access to schools or with parents who could not afford to send them to school. For these highly vulnerable children, one-third of whom were orphaned, Learning at Taonga Market offered the best chance at a quality basic education.

Zambia today is facing tough economic challenges from a collapse in the price of its major export, copper. This has meant mass layoffs in the mining sector, and a related influx of families streaming into the capital city, Lusaka, looking for work. With this has come severe overcrowding in schools, particularly in the lower grades.

In some of the schools we visited in and around Lusaka, primary school classes average more than 100 learners, and some schools run two shifts a day to try and cope with the numbers. Teachers are overloaded; and this is made worse by a lack of basic teaching supplies. Some of the schools are electrified; however, with the high cost of electricity and regular power cuts, they operate mostly without power.

In an effort to try and alleviate the teachers’ burden, the Zambian Ministry of Education has informed us they they require more Lifeplayers to help fill the gap.  It’s already an official Ministry learning educational tool for urban, as well as rural, schools. Given their own budget cut-backs, they’ve appealed to us to fund an urgent supply of 500 Lifeplayers for pre-schools and grade 1-3 classrooms in and around Lusaka. We will be sending the first consignment of Lifeplayers to Lusaka in June, and conducting training teachers how to use and maintain them.  

“This is the exact type of situation that the Lifeplayer was designed for,” said Kristine Pearson, our CEO, who has been visiting Zambia regularly for nearly 20 years.  “It is impossible for a teacher to manage and provide meaningful instruction to classes of this size.  The Lifeplayer will help ease the burden while the children have fun learning.”

We ended 2015 with a productive trip to Zambia, to connect again with our partners and visit schools that are using our solar and wind-up Lifeplayer MP3s.  What a wonderful trip it was, too!

We’re excited to report that the Ministry of Education has committed to installing a radio transmitter with a national footprint, which will have dedicated channels just for education programs. The first programs to be broadcast will be Learning at Taonga Market, the interactive radio instruction (IRI) lessons that have been used in the country for the past 12 years. This means children everywhere in the country will be able to access radio school; and even government schools may decide to listen, given the severe shortage of trained teachers. We’ll be working with the Ministry to supply more Lifeplayers to community schools, beyond what we had initially thought.  This exciting news means we'll be able to support many more students and their teaching mentors.

Although we hadn’t planned for our Lifeplayers to be placed into urban schools as a priority, we visited an elementary school in Lusaka through our old friend Mr Mvula, the very first teaching mentor we worked with in Zambia. Impossibly crowded with 5,000 students, the school runs two shifts a day; one in the morning and another in the afternoon. Of the students, 75% are orphans, all are from poor families, and double shifts are the only way to cope with the number of children enrolled. Even so, each class has around 130 children.  The job of teaching such large classes is made more difficult by a lack of resources and basic supplies like chalk. Having Lifeplayers provides an outstanding solution to support teaching at these urban schools.  

As a second grade teacher told us, “If I had a Lifeplayer half the class would listen to the radio teacher, while the rest could listen to me. Then we could switch. Having a radio teacher is like having a teaching assistant.  It would be such a help to me and a benefit to the children because they love the lessons.”  And we saw for ourselves how much they enjoyed learning through songs, dance and movement.  This school alone wants 20 Lifeplayers – and as soon as possible!

We’re looking forward to another trip to Zambia in the near future, where we’ll be visiting community schools in the eastern part of the country.  With your help, we can help provide a high quality, basic education to hundreds, even thousands of learners, for around $1 per student.  One Lifeplayer reaches at least 60 learners and often it’s more than 100.  We think it's a great investment!