Children's Education in Third World Countries

Delivery of quality children’s education in third world nations has become recognized as a crucial factor in raising the standard of living in impoverished countries. Major strides have been made in developing world-class educational institutions in India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Egypt, Thailand, Turkey, the Philippines, and significant areas in South America and the Persian Gulf Arab States.

Nonetheless, developing countries still face immense challenges to provide basic education to their poorest populations. Educational facilities in remote locations faces a host of obstacles , and low income families cannot even consider the cost involved in sending children to school until the basic needs of food, shelter and clothing have been met.

To reach these low income families, educators are devising new delivery systems which take advantage of modern technology. Televisions, satellites and computers are being developed as educational tools for children in remote and impoverished areas where it is cost prohibitive to build and maintain regular schools.

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The EduSat program is just one example of how developing technologies have been successfully used to deliver instruction to children in third world countries. In Mexico, the Edusat TV network has been providing secondary education in rural areas since 1968, and in 1994 they began broadcasting Telesecundaria using digital satellites. This technology uses set top boxes which broadcast on 5 channels. Mexican public television also provides educational programming on free channels around the metropolitan areas.

In India, radio has already been successfully used to reach large sections of children in the rural areas. But with the launch of the EduSat satellite in 2004 by the Indian Space Research Organization, over 100,000 of the 169,000 secondary schools now receive educational television. Ideally, this will lead to ‘interactive classrooms,’ although there is currently much debate about how to make the best use of actual computers, and whether to produce cheap laptops for individual students or design computer labs in schools. A recent study in Malaysia reported that although they had been provided a new computer lab, students did not receive any instruction on the machines. This was because there was no one qualified to teach the programmes, so the computers remained locked in the lab and were not assimilated into the current curriculum.
 

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