UNESCO and Nokia launch phone application to improve literacy skills

Shaping the Future Education through Mobile Phones:  

Karachi – 3rd July 2012: Nokia as well as UNESCO Pakistan are honored to unveiling a basic literacy application named eTaleem for Nokia phones. ETaleem allows people to with no trouble access lessons for Urdu reading, phonetics, word synthesis, sentence making, and basic math. ETaleem app has been developed by Lakson Business Solutions for Nokia as a component to the UNESCO Project “Mobile Literacy training for Literacy Training of Rural Female Adults”. The application can be downloaded on the most reasonable Nokia S40 devices (list of devices available on the link mentioned below in the last of this informative article). 

According to the most up-to-date Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) Survey 2010-11, the literacy rate across the country is 58 percent, with lower rates in rural areas for women. Using a mobile phone as a learning tool via the UNESCO project can speed up the literacy level countrywide. 

The knowledge and learning piece of content to Nokia’s eTaleem app is based on UNESCO’s learning DVDs designed also tested in community learning centers all over Pakistan. By enabling access to the high-quality educational material via reasonably priced mobile phones, Nokia broadens the reach of the UNESCO pieces of training to rural areas, supporting continued learning after the community classes’ attendance comes to an end.  

“We are appreciative of Nokia enabling access to our contents of basic literacy via a modern mobile phone application. It is a great prospect for our post-literate learners, as using this application on the mobile phone as well as in the Urdu language, will keep them together with reading besides writing skills and making literacy abilities related to 21st-century life demands,” said Kozue Kay Nagata, Director, also Representative of UNESCO Pakistan.  

carrying out the mobile learning element, the program increased the Government Sectors’ support, with the Literacy Department of Punjab as well as the Education Department of Ministry of Capital Administration Development as new partners to the enterprise for higher literacy perception in Pakistan. “To institutionalize our literacy project in the system, we must upgrade our project to the government sector, with the intention that a larger number of users can benefit from the project in the upcoming future”, added the Director of UNESCO Pakistan.  

“Mobile learning can develop and enhance learning opportunities for all. In inaccessible areas or places where accessing education materials can be complicated, Nokia tools such as eTaleem or Nokia Education Delivery - which are both, used within the UNESCO project – can bridge the digital divide. These mobile learning tools host a great potential to make a real dissimilarity in people’s lives, giving them easy access to quality education” says Ulrike Vott, Nokia’s Regional Sustainability Manager for the Middle East and Africa.  

Presently, 2500 adult female learners in rural districts of Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa KPK are using the eTaleem application as part of their six-6 month’s literacy training. For the period of the past few months, the UNESCO Project used an additional Nokia solution - the Nokia Education Delivery to instruct and train 70 teachers in 7 districts supporting their specialized development. Nokia is providing the mobile learning modernizations to UNESCO as part of the organizations’ global partnership: UNESCO and Nokia joined hands to progress towards meeting one of the United Nation’s Millennium Goals -“Education for All”. 

The complete list of compatible devices, Installation Procedure, and the eTaleem application can be downloaded from this site: