Beating The Odds One SMS At A Time: Camfed Fights For Education Equality In Sub Saharan Africa

Beating The Odds One SMS At A Time: Camfed Fights For Education Equality In Sub Saharan Africa

The odds seems stacked against young women trying to get an education in sub-Saharan Africa. Over 24 million girls can’t afford to go to school. The few that can will likely face incredible barriers just to get an education, if they’re not first excluded from an education for simply being female. Nonprofit, Camfed, knows the odds and they’re beating the odds.

Camfed works in the most remote and poorest parts of Africa, helping girls on an individual basis to ensure they have the educational opportunity they’re entitled to.  Since 1993 they’ve directly supported 1,419,278 students to go to school (and improved the learning environment for over 3.5 million children). Camfed hope that the sum total effect of millions of educated young women – further supported by Camfed to transition to leadership positions in their communities – can help change the systemic issues that make it difficult for girls to receive an education. In order to track that change, Camfed needs data on who they help, where, and when. To do that they use Twilio SMS.

Daniel B Probert, Head of Innovation at Camfed, first used Twilio to build an SMS math quiz at a hackathon called Code for Africa. He saw he could send out questions easily, log responses easily, and left the hackathon thinking, “Where can I use that in my organization?” The answer was in the field.

Camfed partners with a network of local community members in Africa, who work in district committees and in schools, selecting vulnerable girls, ensuring that they receive their entitlements, and tracking their progress. These men and women that Daniel refers to as enumerators, text Camfed valuable data on how students are performing. But initially Camfed struggled to keep the incoming SMS data organized and keep track of their outgoing SMS. This was an issue for Daniel. Data is absolutely essential for Camfed to present to schools, communities, donors, and government partners to decide which funding goes where and to assess if their work is successful. “I love data, it doesn’t matter how much data you give me, I want more data,” said Daniel.

Only an accurate account of their data allows Camfed to deliver cost-effective, transparent programmes. Most importantly, it is the sharing of data with communities that has a huge impact on Camfed’s success, as communities take ownership of the problems, help deliver the solutions, and celebrate their successes – all based on accurate programme data.

Daniel got to work on the problem, using the Twilio API to send and track Camfed’s outgoing SMS. He segmented all of Camfed’s thousands of enumerators into groups within Salesforce, and built triggers that text back the enumerator, thanking them for updating Camfed on how students are doing. Immediately after setting up the SMS triggers Daniel saw an uptick in the data they received. Simply responding to enumerators and thanking them for their contribution made them contribute more substantive data more often.
“I love the simplicity of Twilio,” Daniel says. “It took me about 6 hours to build the application, but the Twilio side was about 15 minutes of work.”  In the past three months alone, Camfed sent out 12,000 responses to enumerators using Twilio. Daniel expects to drastically increase that traffic by sending 200,000 texts in the next six months. To him, a text is a data point, but it’s also a welcome greeting from Camfed to its community partners. “Just something as simple of a text can make them feel so much better,” he concludes.

Learn more about Camfed here.