Education for Humanity: Higher education for refugees in resource-constrained environments through innovative technology

Half of refugee children attend primary school and 22% attend secondary school, yet only 3% have access to higher education. The Education for Humanity team at Arizona State University recently piloted a program addressing refugee’s lack of access to higher education and its associated barriers. From April to July 2019, the team implemented the university-level AGB250 Agribusiness: Economics of the Allocation of Resources course with Windle International Uganda in Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda. Thirty students were recruited to participate in the eight-week course, two local facilitators were contracted to provide daily program oversight and classroom management, and an ASU-based team provided content expertise and course oversight. Students accessed the course content via Arizona State University’s SolarSPELL technology. SolarSPELL is a portable, solar-powered digital library for use in resource-constrained locations, providing locally-relevant, open-access, educational resources to learners by emitting an offline Wi-Fi hotspot to which any Wi-Fi-enabled device within a 50-foot radius can connect. By doing so, SolarSPELL mimics an online experience to help build learners’ information literacy, technology, and digital learning skills in a safe, offline environment. In order to host a university-level course, the team added a learning management system (LMS) to the technology, enabling the SolarSPELL to deliver a complete university course to a remote area. The resulting technology, named ‘Education for Humanity: Powered by SolarSPELL,’ successfully delivered the university course, was found to be a viable solution for providing higher education opportunities in resource-constrained environments, and improved the agribusiness and digital literacy knowledge and skills of participants.