Community Tablet pulls a solar screen roadshow by donkey to teach Mozambique's villages

In 2016 a container pulled by donkey, with four solar-powered LCD screens, rolled into Funhalouro in Mozambique, as BBC News reported in 2019. Founder Dayn Amade says the roadshow aims to make each visit a party: music draws the crowd, then a three-minute film plays on the largest screen. Many in the audience had never seen a screen or moving images. Afterwards people answer questions on smaller touchscreen tablets, with diagrams for those who cannot read, and the best scorers win T-shirts and caps.

Amade, who was born in Mozambique, got the idea watching his two sons learn from YouTube tutorials. He argues that giving everyone a tablet is impossible because it is too expensive and recipients may sell it, and the BBC notes One Laptop Per Child did not deliver on its promises. The project earns its money from NGOs, which have used lecturers and pamphlets: 'If people get a pamphlet, they throw it away,' he says. Amade says it is 'safe and robust' and 'cannot be broken and it cannot be stolen.'

Amade says he learned from mistakes: a cholera-hygiene animation offended a largely Muslim community by showing the right hand used for wiping, so all content is now shown to anthropologists and psychologists at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo first.

Per-person devices are expensive and can be resold, so the tablet stays with the project instead.

Music and a party mood fill the audience before a topic as dry as digital literacy begins.

A quiz with prizes forces attention and tells NGOs whether the message landed.

Diagram questions let people who cannot read take part.

Pre-screening content with anthropologists avoids offending specific communities.

When individual devices are too expensive or get sold on, a shared, rugged, entertaining screen with a built-in test can reach people that leaflets never do.

By 2019 Amade had spent about three years visiting 90 remote communities in Mozambique. He reports (self-reported, as given to the BBC) that a civic-education campaign was followed by 45% higher voting, a family-planning campaign by a 27% rise in contraceptive intake at health centres, and a financial-inclusion campaign by 68% more new bank accounts. The Community Tablet has a UK patent, and he was looking to franchise it, move into urban areas and try careers advice in schools.