Education in Conflict Zones: a Web and Mobility Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel web and mobile-based educational framework tailored for conflict zones like Afghanistan, aiming to provide resilient, standardized education despite security challenges and gender discrimination.

Contribution

It presents an improved virtual school model that overcomes traditional limitations, leveraging social media and mobile internet to deliver education in conflict-affected areas.

Findings

Model effectively reaches students in insecure regions.

Addresses gender discrimination barriers.

Provides standardized education despite conflict conditions.

Abstract

We propose a new framework for education in conflict zones, considering the explosive growth of social media, web services, and mobile Internet over the past decade. Moreover, we focus on one conflict zone, Afghanistan, as a case study, because of its alarmingly high illiteracy rate, lack of qualified teachers, rough terrain, and relatively high mobile penetration of over 50%. In several of Afghanistan's provinces, it is hard to currently sustain the traditional bricks-and-mortar school model, due to numerous incidents of schools, teachers, and students being attacked because of the ongoing insurgency and political instability. Our model improves the virtual school model, by addressing most of its disadvantages, to provide students in Afghanistan with an opportunity to achieve standardised education, even when the security situation does not allow them to attend traditional schools. One of the biggest advantages of this model is that it is sufficiently robust to deal with gender discrimination, imposed by culture or politics of the region.