Abstract
This article examines the changes occurring in learning and literacy in the age of ubiquitous mobile phone use. Focusing on rural Kenyan women’s use of mobile phone technologies in civic education programs, mobile banking, and to contact family members, the article explores how these women’s use of mobile phones, based on their everyday needs, has facilitated the development of a literacy. The women learned to read on their phones to receive money, civic education information, and to communicate with their family members. In this process, these women, who self-identified and are also nationally classified as illiterate, developed a relevant social literacy through active use of text-based mobile phone applications.
Keywords
Introduction
Every minute of the day, millions of people around the world are connected to each other through a small, ubiquitous technological device: the mobile phone. From its simplest form to its most advanced developments and innovations, most of us use mobile phones to remain connected with loved ones, to complete business transactions, to receive news, to socialize, and to learn. What this means, is that for better or worse, we are implicated in technologies of connectivity, liberation, and scrutiny. In this article, we reexamine the very construct of literacy by exploring how the ubiquity of a banking system that works through mobile phones in Kenya produces a new functional literacy that is shared among Kenyans across the nation. We focus on how the move toward mobile banking transactions as currency has influenced the growth and embracement of mobile literacies needed to participate in socioeconomic life, and the fact that this growth has provided a site of learning. In order to explore the embracement and expansion of mobile phone use for banking and sending short messages, we identify varying modalities of literacy, and pose three questions: (1) How can we reimagine learning and literacy in the age of ubiquitous mobile phone use? (2) Why do national and global education policies emphasize printed and written literacies when they are not prevalent in specific contexts? (3) What social, political, economic, and cultural realities introduce multiple literacies to communities? 1
To understand this mobile-based learning in the Kenyan context, we begin with statistics about the gap between Kenya’s literacy rate at 72.2% (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2013) and mobile phone use in the country at 93%, of which 73% of users are mobile money customers (Demombynes and Thegeya, 2012). We use the case of a rural subsistence farming community in Kenya to understand the discrepancy between low literacy rates and growing mobile literacy—the ability to read and “write” on a mobile phone—and how we can include learning approaches that exploit existing infrastructure and enhance pedagogical capacities in national curricula. This article does not focus on the precise policies or the literacy traditions that exist in Kenya. Rather, we provide an example of how literacy functions in Kenyan daily life among those considered “illiterate” and we attempt to outline the local socioeconomic currents that have informed the expansion of mobile literacy and how this expansion is absent in educational policies. Essentially, what is at stake here is a break away from past notions of knowledge production and learning: the literacies required by educational policies versus the reality of the literacies required (and being used) in everyday life. By focusing on this functioning literacy that has been proliferated by economic demands, communication needs, and advances and innovations of a technology that can place knowledge circulation in the hands of students/learners, we turn from the what should be done, to what is happening. Among these users of technology who are unrecognized, and whose perspectives fall out of traditional education and development policies, we suggest that functional literacy is already in place, and is rapidly growing.
The whole point of beginning this article by centering mobile technology around rural, adult “illiterate” women is not to treat these technological innovations as a panacea for literacy, but rather as an opening to consider what is meant by literacy, and how definitions of il/literacy that are based on rigid understandings of sites of learning often miss pervasive literacies that fall outside traditional sites of learning and are connected to everyday social interactions. Paying close attention to the small, rural subsistence farming community as a snapshot (in time) and as an iteration of functional literacy, we argue that not only does mobile technology, as a tool of communication and economic exchange, provide a site for learning and literacy, but that this learning and literacy is local in its formation, as well as being translatable to other sites. In Kenya, mobile phones are used for civic education in legislative processes (Maingi, 2011; Sanya, 2013), national development and social transformation (Komen, 2014), in monitoring national public health concerns such as malaria (Githinji et al., 2015), and in Kenya’s internationally celebrated mobile phone banking system that has set a standard for mobile banking globally. All these processes require an ability to read and text on mobile phones; however, discourses on literacy seem to exclude these already existing successes or newly adopted modes of learning. As such, we argue that the use of mobile phones by Kenyan feminist organizations in civic education and constitutional review processes, in order to make historical and political transformations, exemplifies what Stuart Hall calls “articulation” (Hall, 1985; Hall, 1996; Clarke, 2015). As far as users are concerned, not only are the technological aspects of mobile phones and what they can be used for important to them but, in addition, they are using the phones to express and articulate themselves, using this new-found literacy to challenge existing norms, as well as social and political situations. This localized mobile phone use is a way of resisting or ameliorating a person’s powerlessness, opening up “the possibility of making the political, or making the civic, or making history” (Sassen, 2011: 574). Hall’s theory is instructive here, because we can understand choices made by Kenyans in their mobile phone use as not merely for convenience, comfort, or chance, but rather for what they actually desire to learn in order to enhance and, ultimately, transform their lives. This literacy extends beyond the ability to read and write: it is competence and knowledge. Hall explains: the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? The so-called “unity” of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary “belongingness.” The “unity” which matters is a linkage between the articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected (Grossberg 1986: 53). different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness.’ The ‘unity’ which matters is a linkage between the articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected.
Even though the primary focus of literacy scholarship in the field of educational policy studies has traditionally been on reading, comprehension, and cognition, there has also been a recent turn to global, local, glocal, and sociocultural approaches that foreground the question “What really counts as literacy?” Or, as astutely asked by Carmen Luke, apropos the contemporary moment, “What is the information revolution? How do the new technologies impact our lives now and what might these changes mean in the future? What might all this mean for education, for teachers and students, for learning and teaching?” (2000: 69). For the Kenyan women we feature in this article, education’s role in overdetermining political participation and access to numerous rights is evident in the “linkage between that articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected” (Grossberg, 1986: 53). This group of rural women with little or no formal schooling propel me into a discussion on the limitations of national and international educational “standards,” as well as the forms of learning and knowledge acquisition that drive policy-making. According to UNESCO, an individual can be said to be literate when able to: “engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning in his group or communality and for enabling him to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for his own community’s development” (Belalcázar, 2015: 21). Notably, the power constructs that regulate social and cultural contexts make their way into the lives of students in the form of curriculum, classrooms, and school practices (Giroux and Aronowitz, 1993); thus, the question is: in what ways does technology use, bypass, or reify those structures? We finish this article with questions for future research, not solutions. We ask, if people who are otherwise considered illiterate are reading and using interactive, text-based mobile technologies, should we be reconsidering or extending how we think about literacy to include the literacies developed in the use of mobile technologies? What can we learn from innovative, from-the-ground-up localized use of technologies that are based on the needs of specific communities? This call to reexamine learning materials is not one that is only focused on designing and delivering materials for young learners, but also one that is important to consider in relation to secondary, tertiary, and adult education. As such, we make the case for envisioning social, mobile literacies as a site of pedagogical change and innovation.
This work began as a field research study of how politically generated and culturally ingrained conceptions of gender impact success rates of community programs. The research project was structured around questions that were seeking to understand localized definitions of gender, and also to find out if those very same definitions were incorporated into the goal-setting of community projects. Utilizing a research survey aimed at collecting information in three distinct categories: the first focused on understanding community power structures and hierarchies; the second category aimed at understanding the structural challenges faced by the community services; and the third was concerned with gender roles and women’s rights, both nationwide and in the local community. As part of the research process, we collected demographics on age, sex, marital status, number of dependents, and education. These demographic markers later proved to be influential in the transformation of my research question targeted at venturing deeper into the specific categories to 34 women between the ages of 18 and 68, with 19 of them having fewer than 5 years of formal education and 15 having more than 5 years of education. During the transcription and analysis of results, a striking, recurring theme emerged: women with the lowest levels of formal education were questioning their rights, their marginalization in positions of leadership, and expressed an awareness of the injustice surrounding negative treatment in community facilities.
Research continues to show that literacy has a significant influence on life chances and trajectories and that it provides avenues where people can negotiate power relations (Egbo, 2000; Freire, 1996; Luke, 1994; Stromquist, 1990; Stromquist, 1992). Attempts to dismantle or maintain gendered hierarchies of power have been situated in schools as sites of learning. On the one hand, global and national policy shifts to provide schooling opportunities for girls have provided girls and women with opportunities outside of domesticity that were not previously available. On the other hand, however, the policies don’t fully capture two key components of schooling: first, as most educators are aware, schooling isn’t the same as education; and, second, schooling is also a cultural process and can (and does) perpetuate gendered discrimination or maintain and normalize hierarchies.
The misnomer that schooling can be equated with education, literacy, and learning or the assumption that women with less schooling were less aware of their rights was readily debunked in a qualitative study. During this study, featuring in-depth interviews, focus groups, and participant observations, it was apparent that the women who had more than five years of schooling reported injustice with a sense of complacency and acceptance. They were aware of gendered marginalization and were also aware that these experiences of marginalization were discriminatory. At the same time, they cited and accepted different hierarchies (as learned in schooling processes) as legally codified and socially entrenched. This clearly raised questions about how to understand the emancipatory nature of literacy, schooling, and education. However, during 33 out of the 34 interviews, something significant and more striking was happening. While most of the women interviewed identified themselves as illiterate, or stated that they had never been to school, all but one of them used their mobile phone during my interviews. They were all active users of a mobile phone banking application called M-Pesa, and the interviews were consistently interrupted by answered phone calls and/or text messages. The women who answered the phone calls typically responded by reading the names on their caller identification, and received money from and sent money to someone whose name they read or typed on the screen. While the mobile phone banking system, discussed in the next section, requires little literacy, it still requires an ability to read. What the study could not establish fully is whether the argument that exposure to education matters a great deal when it comes to the use of technology-based products is a valid one. This study, therefore, took the view that the capacity for unschooled and semi-illiterate persons to quickly capture the skills of manipulating the considerably sophisticated mobile phone menu items is of a derived nature and a literacy that is by no means the conventional definition of the term. It emanates from the motivation the facility provides in terms of real-time monetary worth and the solutions offered and needs that can be met through the circulation of the cash held by the mobile phone. In addition, since the mobile phone is perceived to hold cash, users, their literacy level notwithstanding, inevitably acquaint themselves with the monetary-oriented menus, just like they would acquaint themselves with new currency.
The prevalence of mobile phone use reveals what educators have long documented: learning not only happens in the classroom, and this learning and literacy, while not equivalent to classroom learning, is literacy. Functional literacy in this case is contingent upon economic needs (mobile banking) and communication needs and it veers away from the common assumption that literacy is, and must be, a universal set of standard skills that, if taught and once learned, can be applicable anywhere, everywhere, and in the same way. For example, critical theorist Henry Giroux (1992: 367) defined literacy as: A form of culture citizenship and politics that provides the conditions for subordinate groups to learn the knowledge and skills necessary for empowerment … to live in a society in which they have the opportunity to govern and shape history rather than be consigned to its margins. a person is functionally literate if they can engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning of his/her group and community and for enabling him/her to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for his/her own and communities development.
In the Kenyan case, literacy skills developed to use mobile banking would later come in handy when feminist organizations, such as Warembo Ni Yes! and the Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya (FIDA-Kenya), used text messaging in a nationwide campaign to facilitate education and to educate women about the 2010 constitution. These groups explained the areas of the constitution that articulated alternative political values and visions which were transformative for women. In so doing, the women learning from these civic organizations led successful campaigns that weren’t limited by literacy within the classroom but by a more inclusive literacy that embraced existing social literacies. This approach, which has been discussed in the field of critical literacy, centered around the existing knowledge and life experiences of local cultures, foregrounding community-specific literacies. Critical literacy, tightly linked with critical pedagogy, empowers learners to produce knowledge in order to approach the structural inequalities they face with an understanding of power, agency, and history (Freire, 1996). Freire, for example, envisioned a literacy program that introduced “democratization of culture … with men and women as its subjects rather than as patient recipients … capable of releasing other creative acts, one in which students would develop the impatience and vivacity which characterize search and invention” (Freire, 1996: 43). Overall, if literacy is considered as a “catalyst for participation in social, cultural, political and economic activities and for learning throughout life,” a right articulated in the Hamburg Declaration (UNESCO, 1997), then literacy must be understood as glocal, and intersectional. It must also be considered as a tool to make sense of “racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago … skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, impoverishment” (Hartman, 2007: 6), and how subordination and discrimination at a local and national level is reflected in social relations.
You or “u”: Defining literacy in the digital moment
The definition of literacy has always been contentious (Luke, 1989). The Oxford English Dictionary simply states that literacy is “the ability to read and write.” However, literacy has also been defined as a person’s ability to control secondary uses of language (Gee, 1989) and “beyond … functional needs, the linkage of literacy with personal empowerment, social status, and individual growth also drives a variety of literacy efforts” (Ferdman and Weber, 1994: 3). It is no surprise, then, that definitions are constantly shifting, being challenged and expanded to incorporate technological and pedagogical advances. Even though the intellectual currents that underlie policy debates remain rather limited, there has been a growing increase in focus on wider concepts of literacy to include: multiliteracies (Ajayi, 2011; Bancroft, 2016; Banda, 2003; Carpenter and Lee, 2016; Cope and Kalantzis, 2000; Kalantzis et al., 2003; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Luke, 2000); and functional and critical literacies (Freire, 1985; Freire and Macedo, 1987; Verhoeven and Snow, 2001). These expansions of narrow definitions of literacy continue to spread as technological advances are made; there are, now, computer, digital, and mobile literacies. While the introduction of new mediums that require new literacies doesn’t eliminate old literacies, people have to adapt and gain competencies that integrate the old and the new. What becomes important is for both learners and teachers to adapt themselves. There needs to be an understanding of how knowledge is represented on different platforms, and of the cultural and political apertures created by different platforms. Furthermore, literacy is often linked to citizenship and citizen participation.
Contemporary international aid and development rhetoric about Africa and across the Global South regard formal education—as in kindergarten to university schooling—as a tool that fosters empowerment, liberation, and agency. UNDP (1990: 10) defines empowerment as a sustained process of human development that enlarges people’s choices. The most critical of these are to live a long and healthy life, to be educated, and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living. Other choices include political freedom, guaranteed human rights, and personal self-respect. People’s wishes in relation to freedom include opportunities to do and to be what they have reason to value. Education is protected by numerous global/local jurisdictions as a social good. One such jurisdiction is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Although adopted in 1966, this charter still shapes how we think of education—as a human right that is to be directed toward providing a sense of dignity and developing the human personality. Scholars such as Jyoti Puri have explained that “with the support of international aid agencies, national states such as Bangladesh, India, Kenya, and Indonesia have targeted poor and rural women in the interests of national development” (2004: 115). Similarly, Karishma Desai (2016: 248) has argued that the “third world girl” has been branded and marketed as a “as a vector of development with the greatest potential” for national development and a national path out of poverty, without focusing on intrinsic values of education. This is also seen in international policies that center literacy on women who have traditionally been marginalized, without necessarily addressing the factors creating marginalization.
In 2007, Safaricom, Kenya’s largest mobile network operator, launched M-Pesa, a mobile money transfer system that is now used by over 23 million registered people. Actually, as of 2014, nearly half (43%) of the Kenyan population had access to the Internet, 58% had mobile money accounts, and 72% owned a mobile phone 2 (World Bank, 2015a; World Bank, 2015b). This system, originally designed to improve the speed of microfinance loan repayments by making these using a mobile phone in order to reduce the costs associated with handling cash and, thereby, attracting possible lower interest rates, has become a global phenomenon. With a simple interface and fast process, the system has now widened to become a general money transfer scheme and has become everyday currency in Kenyan lives. 3 This convenience is not without cost to privacy: all phones are registered and tracked by M-Pesa and national identification documents are required to register for the service. After registering for M-Pesa, the subscriber pays fees and, on checking if sufficient funds are available, he/she can send and also receive money on his/her mobile phone. Users can also deposit and withdraw cash for and from friends, families, service providers, and traders through one of Safaricom’s 50,000 plus agents in Kenya and in the East African region. M-Pesa is so ubiquitous that it is the preferred payment system for electricity, water, school fees, and satellite television. This instantaneous system of money exchange is especially for individuals who send money around the country.
In short, M-Pesa has become an everyday Kenyan phenomenon that keeps people connected while facilitating electronic transfers. Given its success rate, it has become a case study for mobile banking, drawing global attention to an omnipresent part of Kenyan life. Social cohesion and social capital as portrayed by M-Pesa use could be one of the most important forms of intangible benefits, yet it is also the most ill-defined and slippery. Putnam defines social cohesion as features of social life, network norms, and trust that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives. Economists are interested in social capital for its contribution to productivity and this is clearly an impact that mobile phones can provide due to spillover from the individual to the group creating a network effect or social eternality (Bhavnani et al., 2008). In Kenya, mobile banking without a bank account is the order of the day and it has started to displace the use of cash in the country, capturing the attention of global technology companies such as Google and Microsoft. Related to this mobile phone interconnectivity, the Kenyan tech sector has thrived in this moment of confluence and Kenyan innovators have created other applications with global reach. One such example is Ushahidi, an open source crisis-mapping tool that digitally and publically captures, tracks, monitors, and shares information during crises. Born out of the Kenyan post-election violence, its innovators launched this application around the world with the technology used during earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, Nepal, and Japan and in the 2012 US election 4 . These Kenyan technological solutions, which have shifted global technology use, are important case studies beyond the innovative celebrations. They also tell us about what users want, and how users are using existing systems to move toward technologies they find applicable. What we are invoking here is a notion of education that is not beholden to curricula development decided by national or international agencies, but which rather develops knowledge and critical thinking around the innovative technologies that are used ubiquitously in various communities.
What these technologies also create is the need to return to curriculum development and national learning standards to understand how we learn and what we consider education and literacy. Currently, education is conceived as an in-school, in-class, in-institution activity. Absent in such rhetoric are the developments already occurring in innovative start-up and collaborative spaces, where learning has become a more pervasive and necessary reality.
We would argue that this growth in the tech sector in Kenya reveals that the use of these applications on handheld devices is not only an economically significant influence on social development, but that it is also fostering hybrid literacies based on mobile phone short message services (SMS). In addition to using technology for money transfer and general communication, the mobile phone has been used globally as a site for political organization, activism, civic education, and monitoring political processes. In recent years, for example, the Kenyan education system has been reviewed and reformed to increase the focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. At the same time, towns and cities have seen substantial advancement and growth in their digital and technological infrastructure and industry and, at the same time, the entire nation has seen an increase in informal learning influenced not only by M-Pesa, but also the persistence of glocality (Arnove et al., 2012; Bauman, 1998). This, in turn, has started to transform educational agendas, even through these agendas are discursively situated outside of the widespread use of technologies such as M-Pesa. Zygmunt Bauman (1998: 43) has described glocalization as a redistribution of privileges and deprivations … of resources and impotence, of power and powerlessness, of freedom and constraint … a process of world-wide re-stratification, in the course of which a new world-wide socio-cultural hierarchy is put together … What is free choice for some is cruel fate for some others.
Feminist articulations through functional literacy
Three years after the national launch of M-Pesa, Kenya promulgated a new constitution. This was lauded for numerous victories over the old state of affairs and taking steps toward a decentralized government, and the widespread use of mobile phones was involved in the civic education and political campaigning that drove the constitutional review process. As M-Pesa quickly became a national, regional and, eventually, a global phenomenon, with numerous technological actors paying close attention to its rapid implementation, there was also an increase in the use of text-based technology (text messaging, WhatsApp, etc.). This began to close the gap between those considered literate and those considered illiterate. The constitution also introduced significant advances that positively impacted women’s lives, most importantly with the introduction of women’s legal right to inherit land. 5 It is these social, political, economic, and cultural realities that introduced literacies and civic engagement to communities and which were aimed at legislating women’s rights in the constitution, something that we term “feminist articulations.”
The process of introducing the new constitution initiated a public discussion of what rights, political representation, and property women could have. Feminist organizations not only engaged women by encouraging their participation in the referendum but also provided important information about what reforms the constitution was introducing. FIDA-Kenya participated in “legal analysis and the drafting of law, media strategy, political networking, community education, and intensive planning in often unpredictable situations” (Maingi, 2011: 63). Warembo Ni Yes!, FIDA-Kenya, and a host of activists and other non-governmental agencies worked collaboratively to champion the new constitution and, since so many people were already connected to mobile technologies because of M-Pesa, the resulting networks quickly grew into activist spaces, where educational material was circulated on the proposed constitution. The existence of M-Pesa created a literacy, an infrastructure, and a ubiquitous presence for financial transactions, all of which were utilized by these organizations.
Scholars in the humanities and interpretive social sciences invite us to reimagine and reconsider the spaces that are physically, digitally, and temporally created. We would like to imagine this in terms of the organizing and learning coordinated by these feminist organizations. FIDA-Kenya and Warembo Ni Yes!, along with other feminist activist organizations, created spaces where learning experiences included complexities of societies and opinions while minimizing the impact of essentializing or homogenizing those who learn (Bhabha, 1994). They had a system of learning that was seeking to disrupt and challenge social, cultural, economic, and political structures that didn’t represent what they saw as fit for their futures. As a major actor in the political scene, FIDA-Kenya, a feminist legal organization formed after Forum 1985 to promote women’s individual and collective power to claim their rights in all spheres of life, was actively involved in the constitution writing and review process. Once a draft was generated, FIDA-Kenya partnered with dozens of organizations as well as working alongside collectives such as Warembo Ni Yes!, the national collective. Warembo Ni Yes! brought together young women from diverse populations and who supported the proposed constitution (Hagensen, 2014; Malek, 2010; Ocholla, 2011). Shared information that was focused on civic education showing how the new constitution would impact women’s lives was circulated around the country via SMS. This was the basis for organizing educational forums to ensure that different economic backgrounds, ethnicities, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, gender identities, races, and abilities were represented in the national dialog. As Zembylas and Vrasidas explain (2005: 81), technologies can offer the most powerful networking platform for communication, information, education, democracy, culture, and business that is unrestricted by borders. As aspects of globalization, ICTs impact on mobility and communication and cause social, cultural, political, and other changes around the world.
For all intents and purposes, the rights articulated in the new constitution were significant, with proposals made to introduce affirmative action measures in order to move “towards gender parity in Kenyan politics” (Wanyande, 2003: 50). These legislative changes, which have yet to be translated into policy and practice codified some of the shifting norms and social practices. It was of paramount importance that the constitution was not simply amended but rewritten to eliminate statutes and clauses that permitted discrimination. For example, feminist human rights lawyer Kaari Murungi (2002: 62), described the status of Kenyan women under the pre-2010 constitution: In Kenya, it is permitted by the constitution to discriminate against women on the basis of personal laws. By the 1997 IPPG constitutional amendment, discrimination on the basis of sex was disallowed. However, the discrimination is so entrenched in other sections of the same constitution (s90 and 91), customary and statutory laws, that this belated amendment has had little advantage for women since 1997. laws relating to marriage, custody of children, divorce and separation, succession, and citizenship all provide[d] differential treatment for men and women with men having choice and advantage and women being subjected to traditional and customary practices in instances where the law cannot conceive a choice being exercised by the woman.
If we consider the mobilization of Kenyan women and locate their organizing in a chronological time frame, we can trace various prominent international events coming after this Kenyan mobile phone-driven activism. All these events illustrate how the need for systemic change influenced how technology was used and introduced new literacies: Warembo Ni Yes! was launched in Nairobi on 7 June 2010, the Arab Spring came into media attention on 18 December 2010, and Occupy Wall Street in September 2011. Whereas the use of mobile technologies to mobilize marches, protests, and political action in other areas of the world has been documented, in the spectacular Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring these were not the first or only forms of organizing in the global context. What we learn from these particularly spectacular acts is that mobile technologies have transformative power, have a continued presence, and have political implications. However, we want to argue, for various reasons, that it is important to trace this mobilization back to when Kenyan women undertook this strategy and also to tie it to activism by Kenyan women. First, since this organizing didn’t happen in the full view of the international media and is often excluded from longer narratives of organizing, there isn’t a global narrative. Second, while this mobilization was not the only driving force in transforming the Kenyan constitution, accounts from that time situate it as that. Moreover, since the work of these organizers dovetailed with other organizations purely championing a vote in favor of the new constitution, it was subsumed in the larger spectacular victory, and the educative practices of Warembo Ni Yes! were ignored. Third, this mobilization had lasting pedagogical implications: women learned how to read basic text messages; they learned how to write clarifying questions; and they learned their constitutional rights. Or, in purely traditional academic terms, women were engaged in basic reading lessons, development of critical thinking and application of knowledge to their daily lives, and learning civics and social studies.
Reconfigured lessons: Kenyan women organizing, activism, and messaging
In his writing on articulation, Stuart Hall calls for us to think about the processes that took place in developing certain articulations. Articulation, Hall (1985: 113–114, fn. 2) explains, is a connection or link which is not necessarily given in all cases, as a law or a fact of life, but which requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all, which has to be positively sustained by specific processes, which is not “eternal” but has to be constantly renewed, which can under some circumstances disappear or be overthrown, leading to the old linkages being dissolved and new connections—re-articulations—being forged. It is also important that an articulation between different practices does not mean that they become identical or that one is dissolved into the other. Each retains its distinct determinations and conditions of existence. However, once an articulation is made, the two practices can function together, not as an “immediate identity” (in the language of Marx’s “1857 Introduction”) but as distinctions within a “unity”.
Five years later, M-Pesa has changed, and the Kenyan constitution has also changed, following extensive intervention from various stakeholders who politically organized and educated Kenyans. However, little has changed in the way that technology use is imagined as a site for learning, with the exception of NEPAD’s (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) e-school pilot programs currently being in implemented in nine African counties, including Kenya. The project aims to provide ICT skills and knowledge to learners in primary and secondary schools to enable them to function in the information economy and knowledge society (Farrell, 2007). However, literacy as advanced through technology with the aim of reaching adult learners hasn’t gained much traction. It is puzzling that there is still no mobile learning policy in the Kenyan national curriculum or in the nation’s educational policy and that ICT learning still privileges computers and tablets in a nation that has successfully proliferated mobile phone use (largely through banking). Or, perhaps even more simply put, in a world where digital inequality persists, yet where mobile phones, and the functional literacies sustained by the use of them, and the need and demand for them, create opportunities to reconceptualize educational policy both for schooling practices and adult learning, those who already use the technologies in their everyday lives are able to take advantage of them in order to grow and transform their learning.
In compartmentalized development imaginaries (see Macharia, 2017), and the preoccupation with microfinance’s ability to ameliorate the suffering of women in the developing world, which was prevalent, persuasive, and pervasive in the rhetoric toward developing world nations, this robust, rich technology, which lent itself to be used for rapid financial transfer, has all but become currency in Kenya. Kenyans from all walks of life, including those who would be deemed as illiterate by global standards, use M-Pesa and other text-based services. While this is not a claim that those with no experience in traditional classrooms have the same literacy levels as those who have attended school, it is a call for an examination of this success and a consideration of what sort of literacy has been introduced based on a need to access money and to conduct everyday life activities. Furthermore, enhanced social networks and inexpensive, secure, instant money transfer leads to reorganization of family economic relations and communal participation.
A variety of education statutes and policies focus on education as the most suitable way to ameliorate women’s lives, but those policies still don’t use the mobile phone, the most readily available technology. Furthermore, these policies foster the implementation of education. How, then, can we understand and define education, learning, and schooling if technology, new media literacies and hybrid literacies were to be included (Razfar and Yang, 2010; Ware and Warschauer, 2005)? As such, we argue that we need to think about bringing together existing literacies with those that have long been used successfully, along with new media literacies as well. To enhance value and relevance, education should equip individuals with skills and knowledge that reach beyond traditional learning spaces and move toward improving adult literacy and lifelong learning. Mobile phone subscriptions in Kenya have increased dramatically over the past decade with over 60% of the population having access to a mobile phone (Aker and Mbiti, 2010). Furthermore, as Chiumbu (2012) reminds us, technology has instrumental use, so perhaps it would be advantageous to turn to education and technology’s educational capacities by capitalizing on users’ capacity to utilize technology and shape it to work toward their needs as discussed above in terms of M-Pesa and texting in Kenya.
By all accounts, the role of women’s groups, such as FIDA-Kenya and Warembo Ni Yes!, and their use of new techniques of mobilization bolstered by the affordances of mobile phones and text messaging to spread the word of change and popular democratic participation to communities of the rural poor is both inspiring and insightful. It challenges us to think hard about settled areas of thought such as knowledge diffusion and technology, in particular, the notion of “reinvention” or the radical adaptability and dynamic repurposing that defines the everyday existence of individuals and their own articulate application of technologies. The case of women’s organizing and literacy in Kenya leaves room for growth in the integration of mobile technologies into learning globally. This is not just a challenge for Kenya, but one for educators globally in trying to understand how learning is taking place by the use of interactive, text-based mobile technologies and how this can be supported by education policies and lifelong learning goals. This area of learning and its potential for impact cannot be ignored much longer.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our thanks to the editors and reviewers for selecting this article for inclusion in this special issue and for their feedback, which refined and extended its scope and breadth. In addition, we would like to thank Durell M. Callier, Karishma Desai, Anne N. Lutomia, and Cameron McCarthy for reading the article, along with colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who provided opportunities to present the research that informed it.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.