Projects in Education
MILEE
Formal schooling is beyond reach for many children due to child labor. In rural India over 43% of school-age children cannot attend school regularly as they work for the family in agricultural fields or households. However, today we have an opportunity to dramatically expand the reach of education, thus creating greater opportunities for children laborers. As a delivery platform, mobile phones enable children with work commitments to access quality educational resources anytime, anywhere. This is possible as mobile phone access is common among India’s poor. In 2007 mobile phone coverage reached 30,000 rural villages. This number is expected to triple by 2010.
The MILLEE project (Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies) aims to enhance access to literacy among children of school-going age in the developing world using mobile phone based educational games. More specifically, MILLEE aims to complement the formal schooling system by applying mobile learning technology to augment educational opportunities in out-of-school settings.
Our target learners are: out-of-school children who cannot attend school regularly due to economic challenges such as child labor; children living in urban slums and; families that live at or above the Indian poverty line but still cannot afford English language tutoring and would view MILLEE games as the next best alternative.
Already in its sixth year, MILLEE has gained the attention of Indian television and national newspapers and has active partnerships with Sesame Workshop India (operated through its US parent, Sesame Workshop, producer of Sesame Street and other quality localized learning content for children around the world) Career Launcher India Limited, and the Educational Foundation Regional Institute of English (RIESI), a government agency established in 1963 to address the country’s English teaching and learning needs.
While MILLEE has already proven itself as a viable tool for Indian children to learn English (the “power language” of India, which opens doors to higher education and economic opportunity) much work remains for MILLEE to succeed in reaching a larger audience and becoming sustainable both in India and beyond.
Working with Sesame Workshop, which has received a large MacArthur Foundation grant to collaborate with MILLEE, our next step is to build a more robust, second generation of educational games for children in India. We will also begin building distribution channels for our educational games and development communities for our open platform.
Already MILLEE is attracting interest from mobile carriers, from software programmers and entrepreneurs who wish to develop games that target different communities, and from educators who desire to provide affordable, quality education to children at the “bottom of the pyramid”.
Building on its past success of offering royalty-free, educational games to impoverished child laborers, MILLEE strives to expand its geographic reach, giving opportunities to a larger number of children in India and beyond.