Learning Links
In cooperation with the US Agency for International Development, the Kaizen Company is supporting USAID’s ‘Learning Links Program’ in Liberia, a new USAID initiative that provides girls with access to an innovative, safe, and rigorously monitored learning environment. The Learning Links approach works to achieve the following goals:
1. Improve literacy and numeracy skills of girls who have left school due to pregnancy in Bong County, Liberia
2. Provide quality, accessible, and reliable education resources for out-of-school girls
3. Deploy an innovative and potentially game-changing education model that combines proven education approaches in a new way.
Learning Links strives to achieve these goals by tapping into an existing, underutilized resource: literate and numerate Liberian women who want to help their communities and supplement their incomes. With the right mechanisms, incentives, support, and oversight in place, these women provide educational support to pregnant girls and young mothers in Bong County, and more broadly, to out-of-school children across Liberia. The program’s activities train literate and numerate women to serve as tutor-mentors for the Liberian Ministry of Education’s (MOE) Alternative Basic Education (ABE) curriculum, and connect them to girls who have dropped out of school due to pregnancy.
Learning Links uses daily Short Message Service (SMS)-based evaluation questions to track learners’ progress, and provide micropayments to both learners and tutor-mentors via mobile technology for learning performance. The SMS-based evaluations paired with financial incentives generate up-to-date data and increase learner engagement and retention.