One of the first major challenges for this project is how to address payments. Very few people in rural Kenya have bank accounts or credit cards. They don’t have much money either, the region is classified in financial terms as being at the bottom of the pyramid[1]. All this means we need to find alternatives to the ‘register your credit card or bank account for automatic billing’ approach often used in the USA, UK, etc.

In my view, Kenya has one of the most advanced micro-payment systems globally, through the m-pesa service and similar mechanisms from the various mobile network providers in Kenya. And micro-payments via mobile phones is ubiquitous in Kenya, including in the rural areas.

Publishers, rightly need to be paid for their work, unless they choose to provide the material without charge. So we have a conundrum, how to pay for the materials for the teachers… And for this project we shouldn’t assume the teachers, or their schools, can afford or pay for the material. A typical teaching book costs around $10 on Amazon.

We initiated the project by creating accounts for the schools where we provide some credit of £25 (around $40 USD) using gift certificates. The school teachers can then choose to use the credit to pay for several books, and there are lots of books, including the ‘classics’ available free-of-charge.

We need ways to defend against uncapped spending, a Kindle user does not need to authenticate themselves to buy items from Amazon, so they don’t need to enter a password or other security information – money is simply deducted from the credit balance or any linked credit card or bank account. Because we use gift cards and we don’t configure the Amazon accounts with either bank accounts or credit cards, the maximum financial risk is the remaining balance from the gift certificates.

We would like to find ways to enable teachers, and other people with access to micro-payment services in Kenya, to be able to contribute towards or entirely pay for eBooks and other items e.g. newspapers, journals, etc. The most popular micro-payment service is m-pesa from Safaricom, the other Kenyan mobile network providers have similar services. The report from iHub Research[1] provides some useful background information on the use of micro-payments. We have approached Amazon and various publishers and online book selling sites aimed at the Kenyan market to explore these possibilities. They would help to enable the teachers, and people involved in the schooling in the country, to take more ownership of the project.

Wishlists are part of the Amazon service. They provide an elegant way for whoever wants an item to track these requests and to share the requests with other people. In our case, the teachers are encouraged to add items to their wishlist, that’s linked to their Kindle account. We, and other people who would like to support the project can then pick books from the wishlist and pay for them. The requestor (a teacher in one of the schools in Kenya) then receives the book the next time they use the device to connect online. There are some restrictions for Amazon accounts on the Amazon UK site that make it harder for people to buy books for another Amazon account. As far as we know Amazon accounts on the USA site don’t have this restriction.

We would prefer the ability for people to buy Kindle books as gifts for other Amazon accounts, i.e. accounts that work like those on the USA site, as it makes the approval and purchasing more decentralised and enables it to scale further. For instance, a sponsor could fund various books for a school by picking them from that school’s shared wishlist, without any need for intermediaries.

Using wishlists is an effective way to spend the very limited funds wisely, particularly for shared devices, and currently each of our devices may be shared with around 10 teachers at a school.

Another effective mechanism is the ability to download a sample of Kindle books. The teacher can then read the first section of the book to help decide if the book is worth ordering. However we have noticed some samples have very little of the book’s content, possibly for copyright or other commercial reasons? When there is little content the teacher is effectively buying blind – i.e. without being able to read a useful sample first.

[1] The following report, written by iHub Research in Kenya, covers mobile phone usage at the base of the pyramid. It provides a good overview of many relevant factors for this project. It can be downloaded from the World Bank blog here. Other web sites have links to it too.

As an engineer I realise a common risk is to have single points of failure in any system. Therefore, on of the design goals for the project is to reduce the number of single-points-of-failure. In practice this means we are seeking ways to share the knowledge, the support, and how paid content is both selected and paid for.

Our approach of using parallel paths also helps reduce single-points-of-failure.

For practical reasons we started the pilot in Kenya with a mix of the Amazon Kindle devices. These reasons include:

• They can be used for long periods before they need to be recharged,
• They have global 3G connectivity bundled with the devices (provided one uses the 3G models, of course),
• The Amazon Kindle technology and infrastructure are reliable and mature,
• Vast amounts of material are easily available both online and other material can be added over USB,
• Accounts can be shared across several devices and can be topped up using gift vouchers,
• Wish-lists are available so teachers can request material where it can be paid for later on, even by other people abroad. We will cover the topic of wishlists and payments in more detail in another blog post.

We also wanted to start the pilot as soon as practical and to learn during the pilot. We needed to keep the number of variables relatively small, and we did not want to spend months evaluating a vast set of potentially competing technologies.

We don’t know what will work yet, and furthermore there may be alternative options that are more effective than our first choice. So we have consciously adopted an approach where we pick and try several things in parallel. This includes technologies, connectivity, content, schools, content distribution, etc. We expect to expand the number of parallel paths during our experiments and pilot projects. However, we also select and support combinations which seem suitable.

Here are some of the parallel paths we are currently evaluating:

• Devices: we started with 2 devices: The Kindle Keyboard (3rd edition) 3G+Wi-Fi is the main device – we started the pilot with 5 of these. The current Kindle 4 with the 4 way controller, Wi-Fi, (and no touch screen) – we started the pilot with 2 of these.
• Cases: For the Kindle Keyboards we use the Amazon case that includes a built-in LED light; and for the Kindle 4 we use the Solar-Mio integrated case with solar panel built-in LED light and in-built battery. Although these are expensive, our initial impressions are very positive.
• Charging: Our devices need power, and to be recharged. We are evaluating solar panels, with and without internal batteries, as well as the standard mains USB chargers. We will cover the solar and other power options in another blog post soon.
• Connectivity: as mentioned the Kindle Keyboards include 3G, so the teachers can connect directly to the Amazon store, and search Google and Wikipedia without needing Wi-Fi. As the schools don’t have Wi-Fi 3G connectivity provides virtually immediate access to materials for the teachers, even while teaching, etc. However, we also want to evaluate Wi-Fi, and ways to establish rural Wi-Fi for the schools, and the lowest priced Kindle, the Kindle 4, only comes in a Wi-Fi model. So we need to find ways to support these devices in the field as supplies of the older Kindle Keyboard dry up. We will cover connectivity in more detail in another blog post.
• Content distribution: We are using both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ methods of content distribution. Pull is where the user (a teacher in this case) downloads the content to their eReader. Push is where content is sent to devices. Materials are also copied onto the devices directly from a computer using a USB connection. Services including dropbox are excellent to transfer and share materials over the Internet easily and effectively.
• Materials: Many of the books in Swahili are published via Longhorn Publishers and available from Amazon. However there are other publishers of potentially suitable eBooks who don’t support the Amazon formats, instead they publish books in the ePub format. We are in discussion with various publishers in Kenya, and the UK, to find useful and relevant materials for the teachers; together with ways to make the material ‘work’ on Kindles, other eReaders, and  Tablet devices.

We are also evaluating Android Tablets and other eReader devices during the pilot period.

We launched the first pilot project in February 2013 after I, Julian Harty, visited several schools in the Oyugis area of Western Kenya in October/November 2012. The visit was to see in person some of the school classrooms he had sponsored over recent years. Although the schools were well-organised with friendly and helpful teachers and pupils there were no obvious teaching materials in use, apart from a wall painted as a chalk board (or blackboard as they’re also known) and some sticks of chalk.

However, 3G mobile network coverage, was available at the various schools and my 3G kindle device worked flawlessly. During various discussions with school teachers locally, and some who were also visiting from the UK, the germ of an idea was formed to see if e-readers with some suitable teaching materials might help transform and improve the resources available to the teachers on the ground.

From the outset, the aim has been to encourage and support the teachers, technologists, and publishers in Kenya to participate in the project; and to encourage collaboration and sharing of ideas, experiences, good practices, etc.

Welcome to the Kusaidia Mwalimu web site which is where you can learn about our project to help teachers in Kenya, and beyond, to teach more effectively and with a wider range of material than they typically have available.

The name of the site is Swahili for supporting teachers, as that’s the primary aim at this stage of the project.