Researching education for out-of-school children

Ross Woods, 2024, Revisd 2025

The question came up: “What are the best research questions relevant to implementing e-learning for out-of-school children in sub-Saharan Africa?”

How to start

Start by setting specific goals and narrowing your topic. The original topic is too broad even for a PhD dissertation. Depending on your goals, it could take more than a decade of research and implementation work to establish a good digital learning program. For example, “providing e-learning” is very broad, and such a broad topic is not feasible in a single study. If you are examining national systems of education, limit your research to no more than one or two countries, or perhaps only one or two provinces. If you are looking at local education, limit yourself to one or two demographic groups and define the demographic profile of the particular population. You could also choose one aspect as your research topic, such as financial and legal structures, language, social and cultural, education, and e-learning.

Next, do a literature review. You don't know what you might find.

After that, some pre-research by asking people in the field. Again, you don't know what you might find.

What kind of research are you planning to do? A masters thesis, a doctoral dissertation, a government report, some journal articles, or something else? Will you have to address specific program criteria? Will you have a research supervisor?

The simple answers

The simplest way to make effective progress is to locate a segment of the population with a high incentive to learn and a low disincentives, and then run a small pilot program as action research in a specific topic (e.g. basic literacy). In other words, what could you do now that has the highest probability of success? Consider this:

Do the prepatory work to get enough information to plan well.
Plan carefully, start small, and review often.
This would be personally quite satisfying for the researcher.
You need to demonstrate whether or not a particular approach works. (And what do you mean by works?) In other words, you don't yet know the realistic criteria for identifying success. These will probably change during the project.
Accept a risk of failure; you will find it personally difficult to admit any failures in a project that you've worked hard on.
You will almost certainly find that some factors could not have been foreseen at the planning stage.
Be alert to the counter-intuitive. Examples abound. The people who most need education are sometimes very difficult to educate. Programs that are well-planned according to current theory and feasibility studies don't necessarily succeed.

If you can find one or more existing programs in similar countries, another option is to evaluate and compare them order to identify factors causing success and failure. Do a series of qualitative interviews with people in the field and analyze your answers. This could be either a prepatory feasibility study for establishing a real program, or it could comprise an entire study.

No program will be perfectly successful and a few will probably be complete failures.
You’d need some way to define success and failure, which is quite tricky.
You will almost certainly find that some factors could not have been foreseen at program planning stage.
It's likely that few or no programs will resemble what you envisage doing yourself.
No program will be perfectly successful and a few might be complete failures

If the question is “Why don’t kids attend school?” then a research plan is not that difficult. You need to select one or more demographics and do qualitative interviews with open questions. Then analyze your answers with a grounded theory approach. This will probably be the size of a PhD dissertation, but the topic is only suitable for a PhD if very little is known about why country X (or similar countries) have such a high number of out-of-school children.

Two problems to avoid

First, don't use your ideals and dreams to plan a hypothetical program. It would be not difficult, but it could not give supported conclusions. Research is about what happens in reality; it means demonstrating something that actually works.

Second, work toward a solution; don’t just describe the problem. It is better to build a fence at the top of the cliff than to describe in detail how people fall off. For example, you could collect lots of statistics on out-of-school children in sub-Saharan Africa, but nobody would be better off.

Prepatory research

Most, perhaps all, of these topics could be a full study by itself. They might be easier to answer in specific local contexts, and nearly impossible across very different contexts.

Change management

What do you expect of change?

Some changes can be almost immediate.
Some changes can take 3-5 years or perhaps longer.
Some changes take a full generation to implement.

Is elementary school education the best place to start? What about vocational education and small business development that increases personal income?
What factors make people more conservative (change resistant) or more progressive (change receptive)?
What do people aspire to? Would they rather be government bureaucrats, employees in a large company, subsistence farmers, or self-employed?
What incentives do people have to get education?
What disincentives do people have to get education?
Who do those incentives and disincentives apply to: parents, children, local community leaders, government, others? Consider the following views:

“Education of girls and disabled children is a waste of time and money.”
“We don’t want the lower social classes to be educated.” (Don’t forget that some parts of Africa still have slaves.)

Do they think school is a good use of children’s time?

“Only physical work is real work. Sitting and reading is not work.”
“We need kids to help earn money.”
“They help on the farm. If they spend time in school, what will we eat?”
“The girls help me cook.”

What about language?

Will you provide education in English, French, Swahili, or what? (Sub-Saharan Africa has many other languages that are widely spoken.)
Will you be working in students’ first language or a second (or third) language? How proficient will prospective students be in those languages?
Consider the implications for teaching literacy, language arts, etc.
Choice of language is political when governments push the national language or the language of a local elite.
What are the implications for continuing study?

How would you manage it?

Could you manage the operation from one location or would you need local representatives to monitor what hapens on the ground with students?
How often would you need to travel around the region? Is it even possible?
How would you make local decisions? For example, recruitment, solving problems with local groups and individual students?
Would you need to deal with local goverment officials?
Funding is a very big question. It's not so hard until you have to pay salaries.

How could you promote it?

How will you find prospective students?
How will you establish crediblity?
Who are the real clients, that is, the people who make decisions whether or not to study? It might be parents, children, or other community leaders.
What kinds of promotion will appeal to them?

What are the legal and political implications?

Will you work from the bottom up, with small, local programs? Or will you work top-down by influencing government policy?
Is e-learning even legal in those places, and if so, what are you allowed to do? What is illegal? What is not quite legal but quite permissible?
Some countries might require compliance with their government’s curricula.
Are there different kinds of institutional settings? Perhaps something other than a formal school will give best results for your resources.
What recognition would you need? Would students need to take government examinations?
What might change? Some countries have stable governments, but others do not.

Have you considered social and cultural factors?

City people, fringe-dwellers, and rural people can be very different from each other. The children are actually the same, but parents and community leaders are very different in their expectations and demands
What about ethnic loyalties and rivalries?
The politics of control are potentially quite messy.

What if some people prefer that their children be uneducated rather than be influenced by people they do not trust?
They might try to manipulate and control you.
What if questions of money come up? This is a potential minefield; money and power are a deadly mix.

What do they expect of education? A job, prestige, emigrate, to a richer country? In one place, people expected education providers to pay them to study.
How will it fit into family activities?
In some places, local religious leaders will be supportive and eager. In other places, they will see you as a rival or enemy.
Are there systems of local indigenous education with which you would compete? In that context, what is modern education and what is traditional education?
What if they are fatalistic and believe change is either bad or impossible?
Do cultural beliefs change between generations?
You might find that people are very receptive at first, but become less supportive when their enthusiasm wanes.
If people see your program as unsuccessful, they might become resistant to education in the future. (We tried it and it doesn't work.)

Consider specifically educational and teaching issues.

How will you assess their current state of learning and educational needs?
What do they think education is? In some places, people expect and want only rote memory.
How do they see the student-teacher relationship in their culture?
What do they expect of education? A job, prestige, emigrate to a richer country? In one place, people expected education providers to pay them to study. Some places expect only rote memory.
How will you assess student learning, even if it is only informal monitoring?
How do worldview factors affect education?
How would classes work? Would you have an individualized or a cohort approach? What are your expectations of interactions with students?

What do you mean by e-learning?

“Providing e-learning” is very broad. What are your specific goals? Would you actually provide education? Or would you instead be a tutoring service or a website of educational activities?
How will you define success and failure?
How good is Internet coverage in the countries you want to reach? Is bandwidth good enough for video content?
What is the prevailing standard of computer literacy in the communities you want to reach? How does it compare to your educational goals?
In which places are digital tools affordable and available? Which kinds of digital tools?
Is e-learning socially acceptable or do people believe that only a physical building is a “real school”?

What about personnel?

What personnel will you need? Consider managers, course-writers and teachers. What other kinds of personnel?
How will you recruit them, and perhaps train them? What training will they need?

What about after school? If you run a very good program, what can your students go on to do?

Are there schools for them to continue education?
Will they have access to better paid employment than is currently available to them?

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