Certificate of Open Studies – Education in Emergencies: Leveraging African Orality in a Freiran Approach

Education in emergencies in Niger

Niger is a vast continental country in Africa, located almost halfway between the Atlantic Ocean in the South and the Mediterranean Sea in the North, and between the Atlantic Ocean in the West and the Red Sea in the East. Its population was estimated by the United Nations at 27,178 million in 2024 (WorldoMeter 2024), with a very young population, 66% of whom are under 25. The extreme poverty rate remains high at 41%, affecting more than 10.7 million people.³ Since the 1990s, Niger has regularly ranked last or second to last in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index (HDI).

The country’s fragility and vulnerability have been exacerbated in recent years by crises linked to conflicts within Niger’s own territory and in some neighbouring countries (e.g. Nigeria, Mali, Libya). The country faces four hotbeds of security crises within or on its borders: the Lake Chad Basin, the Libyan hotbed, northern Mali and the Mali-Niger-Burkina Faso border triangle, where armed groups continue to attack security forces and civilians. These security crises have an impact on the movement of people. Niger is facing an influx of refugees fleeing conflicts in the region, particularly in Nigeria and Mali, as well as internally displaced persons (IDPs) within its borders.

Other than the severe impact that forced displacement has on infrastructures and the management of national resources, these crises have also led to the closure of several hundreds of schools, depriving tens of thousands of children of education, almost half of whom are girls. In the Tillabéri region, one of the most affected by this insecurity, 693 schools were closed as of July 17, 2024, depriving nearly 58,903 students (including girls: 30,592 and boys: 28,311) of their right to education (Regional Inspection of Preschool and Primary Education 2024; Regional Directorate of National Education of Tillabéri 2024).

To address the challenges of EiE situations and to ensure the continuity and quality of education, the government, with the support of its partners (e.g. Global Education Cluster⁴), has been implementing a programme, since 2022, entitled Response to the challenges of education in emergency situations in Niger (GlobalPartnershipForEducation 2022). Many NGOs are also involved in the implementation of this programme.

Certificate of Open Studies ‘Education in Emergencies’

The COS EiE provides an original training programme through a complex system (Figure 1), organised around seven key stakeholder groups, namely: i) target learners who are referred to as participants since they are educators themselves; ii) two academic partners; iii) NGOs; iv) UNHCR; v) the Ministry of Education in Niger; vi) InZone; and vii) the Centre for Continuing and Distance Education. The last two are affiliated with the University of Geneva (UNIGE), providing technical, financial and infrastructural support, yet they do not contribute to the academic programme per se.

Figure 1

Target learners-educators, participants, are placed at the centre of the educational programme. Being educators themselves means that they have, in turn, respective target learner communities, in which to act as educators and develop educational activities. Within the COS, they are invited to bring in their field/professional experience and to build on it as part of their studies. For example, in one activity dedicated to the history of technologies used in and for education, several participants underlined the importance of radio as an educational medium. This was the starting point for in-depth discussions on radio and four participants chose to work on the topic of maintaining the educational link with out-of-school children through radio in their personal integration project (please see Section 4 for the structure of the programme).

Participants can be classified into 3 main groups:

• Professionals engaged in the field of EiE who work with forcibly displaced persons (e.g. NGO staff, ministry officials);

• Forcibly displaced persons who are active in non-formal education, so-called alternative education (e.g. refugees, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers);

• Institutional actors at the forefront of education provision in crisis situations (e.g. public-school teachers).

Academic partners, namely the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), i.e. the University of Teacher Education of Abdou Moumouni University (Niger) and, at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, the team Équipe de recherche en dimensions internationales de l’éducation (ERDIE) of UNIGE are the co-designers of the content, the pedagogy and, to a lesser extent, the technology (e.g. Koehler, Mishra & Cain 2013). They are also accountable for delivering the certification. ENS plays a key role in liaising with the Ministry of Education to align the programme with governmental policies and actions in terms of emergency education provision, including continuing education formats in Niger. ENS also liaises with NGOs to make sure the programme responds to field needs. Furthermore, it collaborates with UNHCR to recruit participants. Both academic partners, together with NGOs, evaluate the participants’ final personal projects.

NGOs involved in the COS EiE are Action Educative pour le Développement Locale (AEDL-Espoir), Concern, Save the Children, World Vision and Yara LNC. Their involvement is mainly during the face-to-face part of the programme and in participants’ project evaluation. One specific NGO, Yara LNC, plays an additional role as it is in charge of operating the connected learning hub. The connected learning hub has been set up in Niamey to support the distance education modality of the programme and offer access to face-to-face as well as online provision.

UNHCR selects those participants who pertain to the group of forcibly displaced persons and offers them support to empower them throughout the programme and enable them to complete it.

The Ministry of Education in Niger provides the legal setting for regular and emergency education. It has also enabled ENS to identify a certification device within the national nomenclature. It results in the Niger equivalent title of the diploma: ‘The Certificat d’Etude Education en Situation d’Urgence’ (CE ESU).

InZone is a programme of the University of Geneva which pioneers innovative approaches to HE in communities affected by conflict and humanitarian crises, with the ultimate goal of empowering people on the move stranded in transit countries. In the COS EiE it provides technical and financial assistance. This takes the concrete form of memoranda of understanding or agreements between stakeholders, liaising with the Canton and the City of Geneva who support this initiative to provide scholarships for participants and salaries for some of the techno-pedagogical team. It also entails supporting Yara LNC with the connected learning hub and liaising with the NGOs involved in the programme and with UNHCR. Furthermore, InZone liaises with the Centre for Distance and Continuing Education on administrative matters related to the training.

Centre for Continuing and Distance Education (CFCD) of the University of Geneva, provides the legal and administrative setting to actually run the programme and issue certification.

Co-creation process and programme design

This section presents the COS EiE training programme as the outcome of the co-creation process. First the programme design is outlined. Then examples of leveraging orality in the digital are presented and finally information on the technological infrastructure is provided.

Programme design and curriculum

The programme represents 250 student working hours spread over 6 modules lasting 7 months. The first five modules are delivered exclusively at a distance and the last one includes the personal integration project and a face-to-face 3-day seminar (Figure 2).

Figure 2

The curriculum entails 6 modules designed in French. Nevertheless, it is important to underline that when completing activities, participants can use their mother tongue language whenever appropriate. The 6 modules are as follows (Table 1):

• Module 1: Community participation and school management in emergencies

• Module 2: International approaches and frameworks for education in emergencies

• Module 3: Transversal approaches to diversity

• Module 4: Educational alternatives and adult literacy

• Module 5: Pedagogical innovation, curriculum and digitalisation in fragile contexts

• Module 6: Best practices in education and training in Africa

Module 6 is special in the sense that it is dedicated to the personal integration project during the online part of the module. During the face-to-face part of the module, it incorporates a series of case studies presented by NGOs, which are designed to facilitate comprehensive exchanges and reflection on a range of themes. The topics were as follows: Rapid integrated response for children (case by Save the Children)⁵; Access to education and professional training for vulnerable children (case by Yara LNC⁶); Reading camps⁷ and community book banks of the unblocking reading approach as an educational alternative in emergency situations (case by World Vision); and finally, alternative education for young people and adult literacy supported by the community (Sagayar et al., 2024), including in refugee camps (case by AEDL Espoir⁸). All four themes question realities and practices that could be improved to enhance the living and learning conditions of forcibly displaced persons.

Leveraging orality in the digital

The COS EiE is based on six modules that place the learner in an experience-based, inquiry-driven and peer learning perspective (Usher 2018). More specifically, it focuses on the Community of Inquiry model, encompassing social, cognitive, and teaching presence (Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes & Garrison 2013). From the outset, the design was clear: learners do not only learn from the trainer. They learn from their peers, from their own learners, from tutors, from the community. In other words, they learn in a connected way, which strengthens their sense of personal and collective responsibility (Class et al. 2024; Ito et al. 2020; Raffoul 2018; Siemens 2005). Studies have for instance reported the success of WhatsApp instant messaging for learning in Africa foregrounding the advantages of social media connectedness. Nevertheless, they did not discuss data extraction and security issues (e.g. Rambe & Chipunza 2013; Tiemtoré 2022). Very logically, as for any technology, the concept of pharmakon applies: the digital can be a remedy as it can be a poison (Mboa Nkoudou 2020). When data extraction is obviously a poison, digital technology can enable connection but also the preservation and dissemination of oral and indigenous knowledge. Communities can for instance use digital platforms to document and share their oral histories and cultural practices (Ngom & Castro 2019). In this sense, the digital means the preservation of local knowledge transmitted orally, recording for example traditional songs (Mboa Nkoudou & Omgba 2020).

Furthermore, the didactic double-decker approach (Liebold et al. 2023) was leveraged in the COS EiE. It is a concept in teacher education that refers to aligning the materials and strategies that teacher learners use as students with those they will use in the classroom as teachers. This linking provides participants with a context for the use of a resource both in the learner’s position (within the COS) and in the teacher’s position (in participants’ respective education settings). The didactic double-decker concept is explored here to use pedagogical strategies that draw on both appropriate digital technology (e.g. radio, smartphones) on the one hand and ritual pedagogy principles on the other. The aim being that participants become seamlessly able to use these conceptual devices and artefacts in their role as educators (e.g. using proverbs as didactic tools) after having experienced them in their role as learners.

Examples of design using orality

The first activity of Module 5, Pedagogical innovation, curriculum and digitalisation in fragile contexts, is given here to exemplify the design process and its enactment. First, participants were invited to answer 3 questions as a warming up exercise. They were invited to say whether they had already set up a group on a social media network; whether they listened to the radio; and whether they were makers (in reference to fablabs). Participants answered on a forum which gave the entire group a feeling of experiences, values and skills represented and potentially actionable within the COS EiE community and beyond.

Then, they were invited to start Activity 1. This is dedicated to orality and its objectives are to: i) Identify the specific pedagogical features of the system of orality; ii) Plan a relevant learning activity using one form of the oral tradition repertoire; iii) Compare the logics of orality with the logics of writing and the digital use of multimedia. To complete the activity, participants are first invited to listen to a 20 minute audio recording by Professor Amadou Saïbou Adamou who reminds how education is approached in African oral cultures.⁹ They are then invited to think about the content and what they can take away from it as educators. Finally, they are invited to provide the scenario for one learning activity.

The instructions for this activity read as follows: Start with an example from orality that can be used in your practice as educator. If you generally educate children, take an example of a song, tale or myth; if you educate teenagers, take an example of a legend; if you educate adults, take an example of an epic; or else take any form from the oral tradition repertoire that is relevant to the target learners you are designing the activity for, e.g. proverb, fable, poem, maxim, etc. Once you have identified your example, share it on the forum and describe a scenario for its use within a learning activity, specifically mentioning the following elements:

• Target learners (age and community);

• Number of learners;

• Number of educators;

• The activity unfolding as you imagine it and organised around this element of the oral repertoire;

• The pedagogical reasons for your choice (of proverb, song, epic, etc.).

Scenarios produced are shared on a forum to raise awareness of collective intelligence present in the group and get inspiration for participants’ respective educational practices. Two examples of the scenarios that have been produced are shared below.

Scenario 1: Using a song

The target learners are a group of children aged 5–10 from the Tuareg community living in a refugee camp. These children are enrolled in a host school, in a second-year class with 59 pupils and a single teacher. The teacher guides children towards the desired teaching objective. In the case of songs, the aim is to enable children to express themselves freely and also to learn to sing. This element of oral expression has a psychological aspect, in particular by allowing children to release emotions and forget the trauma they have suffered. More specifically, the pedagogical reasons for using songs in teaching and learning in EiE contexts are four:

• Through oral expression, children can recognise themselves;

• Through song, they express their cultural identity;

• Through orality, children maintain their culture;

• Each child develops his or her cognitive abilities through singing.

Scenario 2: Using a tale

• Age of target learners: Children aged 10 to 13;

• Community: Local community in Niger, potentially multilingual;

• Number of learners: 20 children;

• Number of trainers: 1 main teacher and 1 assistant.

The learning activity unfolds in 5 sequences as follows:

Sequence 1. Introduction to the story: The teacher tells the story of the cunning hare and the hyena, using expressive gestures and changing tone to capture the children’s interest.

Once upon a time, in the savannah of Niger, there was a cunning hare and a not very clever hyena who lived near the same baobab tree. One day, the hare found an abandoned millet field and came up with an idea to fool the hyena: the hare invited the hyena to plant the millet together. ‘We’ll share the harvest equally’, said the hare. The hyena, delighted not to have to work alone, accepted enthusiastically. The hare suggested that the hyena choose between the upper part of the plant (the ears of millet) and the lower part (the roots). The hyena, thinking that the hare was trying to trick her, chose the roots, believing that this was the part that contained the most millet. At harvest time, the hare reaped all the golden, tasty ears, while the hyena was left with only the roots. Realising her mistake, she complained about the ruse, but the hare reminded her that she had made the choice herself. This time, when the time came to choose, the hyena, thinking she had learned from her mistake, chose the ears of corn. However, the clever hare had planted tubers that year, and the roots were full of nutrients, while the stems were almost empty. Once again, the hyena was fooled. She realised that the hare’s cunning was not in the choice, but in his ability to always think one step ahead.

Sequence 2. Interactive discussion:

After the narration, the teacher engages the children in a discussion about the lessons learned from the tale, such as thinking before making decisions and the consequences of decision-making.

Sequence 3. Group activities:

Children are divided into small groups to take on the roles of different characters in the story, which helps them to understand each character’s perspectives and develop speaking skills.

Sequence 4. Artistic creation:

Each group creates a small scene illustrating part of the tale, using local materials to make masks or costumes, integrating art and creativity into the learning.

Sequence 5. Wrap up and conclusion:

Groups present their scenes. The teacher summarises the key points of the story and the moral lessons, reinforcing memorisation and understanding.

Pedagogical rationale justifying this scenario:

• Choice of tale: This tale is chosen for its potential to teach cunning and careful decision-making, which are two vital skills in everyday life. The tale is also rich in local cultural elements, making the learning relevant and engaging for children.

• Narrative method and interaction: Active storytelling and interaction with children encourages active listening and information retention, essential for children’s cognitive and social development.

• Use of art and role-play: These methods enable children to better identify with characters and situations, thus strengthening their empathy and social understanding.

• This scenario uses storytelling to integrate orality into teaching, adhering to the principles of orality and making learning dynamic and interactive.

Technical implementation

Finally, with regard to technological implementation, the UNIGE institutional Moodle LMS is used, but with a specific focus on responsive design and use on smartphones. This means that Moodle books, similar to H5P books, have been created for each module. Interactive books allow content to be chunked and made interactive with quizzes, but also encourage participants to use their smartphone for creative activities, e.g. thinking of an oral device like a proverb that is suitable for their educational community and explaining its added value for learners. Participants were introduced to the mobile Moodle app¹⁰ because it consumes less internet connection and is convenient for them as they are often on the move. Three major design orientations were taken:

• Instructional videos as the preferred content format for their orality characteristics and because they are compatible with smartphone displays and facilitate mobile learning;

• Forums and padlets as tools for collaborative learning to support the learning community: participants have access to other participants’ productions and can thus get inspired, comment, interact and co-construct knowledge;

• Considering the infrastructure constraints of participants, specifically the instability of the internet connection. To address this, for instance, videos are stored on an external platform, files are compressed to the minimum size and content is available on a USB key for offline access.

In the medium term, the entire content will be made accessible as Open Educational Resources (OER). For this first edition, only Module 5 was produced in the form of an OER.¹¹

Evaluation of participants from the first COS EiE edition

For the first edition of the programme, out of 30 participants, the majority were NGO staff members (n = 22). This is explained by the fact that NGOs are at the forefront in the field of EiE and were looking for an original programme to train their staff. The remaining participants were working at the Ministry of Education in Niger (N = 2) and refugees from Nigeria, Mali and Rwanda (N = 6). They actively contribute to the refugee communities with, for instance, two of them leading the national urban refugee community and one taking responsibility for education in the community.

The evaluation of the first edition of the programme focuses on the outcomes of assessment of the personal integration project. Indeed, participants’ productions, and specifically this final project, are considered the most relevant way to actually assess the entire programme with real data. Through this final project, the different competences and the overall pedagogical orientation are reflected. Thus, the project provides crucial information with respect to the relevance and effect of the COS EiE on the respective educational communities in which participants work.

Personal projects represent 60% of the final grade, which is composed of two parts. The written part takes the form of an academic paper of about 10 to 15 pages. The oral part consists in presenting the project to a mixed jury of academics and NGOs. To value participants’ projects and efforts, a selection of papers should be published in the near future.

Figure 3 shows the grades awarded in the final assessment across all 30 participants of the first cohort. Each number in the graphic represents one participant. It is notable that the vast majority performed better on the personal project. This may be because the oral presentation part was a way to connect to oral culture on the one hand and also the project is a way to express participants’ respective realities as professionals, i.e. empowering through education in Freire’s sense.

Figure 3

With regards to specific aspects of the culture of orality, comments show that introducing local languages in EiE was appreciated as were community approaches. The effects of the training on participants’ professional activities and/or personal development are already manifest. Effects related to the extent to which their new approach to education affects their target learners is yet to be researched in a future longitudinal study.

Participants’ evaluation of the programme

24 out of 30 participants answered the anonymous institutional questionnaire provided by the internal quality services of UNIGE. The questionnaire had been co-designed by academic partners to address the specificities of the COS EiE as precisely as possible.

Results show that participants are globally satisfied on the 8 dimensions assessed which are: Objectives, Content, Pedagogical Modalities, Workload, Feedback and Tutoring, Organisational Dimensions, Learning Assessment and Global Satisfaction (Figure 4).

Figure 4

Participants pointed out the high value of the face-to-face seminar and suggested adding additional face-to-face sessions during the training to maintain more lively relationships among the COS EiE stakeholders. To address this issue, formal meetings at the connected learning hub will be organised in future editions of the programme. Participants also addressed the workload question in regard to connectivity issues and their professional field activities. To address this issue, a period of “catching up” in between modules will be offered. Finally, participants asked to open the programme to broader target learners. Taking this into account, for the second cohort, an additional profile, i.e. teachers from public schools who have to face emergency education, were also able to apply. Finally, with regard to orality, three comments were made. The first reflects the extent to which the training achieved its objectives in helping participants to understand the role that community engagement should play in the success of actions on the ground. The second reports that the different concepts of the training caught participants’ attention, as did the introduction of local languages in EiE. The last one refers to the fact that the training is very practical, with videos, texts, etc. and, above all, work to do, which has allowed participants to put their knowledge into practice.