Factors that Make Mapping School Connectedness Change-making

Two years into their groundbreaking partnership with UNICEF, in support of Giga, the joint ITU and UNICEF initiative, they have helped to lay a foundation for more than two million children worldwide. It begins with one critical task: mapping schools and school connectivity.

FREMONT, CA: Connectivity opens doors to a better future for children because of the growing importance of integrating digital tools and educational content in educational systems and the emergence of hybrid learning models.

Additionally, just the internet is not enough for schools; there needs to be meaningful connectivity. The ITU- and UNESCO-led Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development's report, Connecting Learning Spaces: Possibilities for Hybrid Learning, emphasises the significance of meaningful connectivity for schools.

This connectivity not only makes it possible for more students to learn online using multiple devices and a wider range of applications, but it also opens up more opportunities for experientially located, remote, and problem- and project-based learning in the field on the job. To ensure that connectivity is enough, fundamental functions can be carried out, and costs are reasonable and transparent, it can be helpful to set targets for a minimum bandwidth for schools.

Furthermore, linking schools with significant connectivity has macroeconomic advantages. A GDP rise would result if improved school connectivity were introduced to nations that are now equipped with below-average connectivity, according to research from the Economist Intelligence Unit study that Ericsson had commissioned. The same study also emphasises the vital importance of laws and initiatives that support social, digital inclusion and tech-based education. Tying together schools can have a significant, far-reaching impact on society as a whole.

Strong Public-private Partnerships Essential to Solve the Connectivity Crisis

To assist the joint UNICEF-ITU Giga effort, Ericsson established new ground two years ago by being the first private sector partner to pledge millions of dollars and provide a sizable in-kind contribution.

By starting that journey, they vowed to stick to the conviction that effective partnerships cannot be formed on financial backing alone. This conviction is based on decades of experience with public-private partnerships. Instead, combining the other essential components—like technological leadership and distinctive industry insights can assist in accelerating transformation more effectively with partners.

By using technology for good, working together, co-creating, and innovating in novel ways, they have shown that when public and private actors collaborate, they can change the world. Also, invite additional private sector leaders to join them on this journey to scale the impact and potential of Giga.

Technical Expertise and Innovation are key to Understanding the Scale of the Problem

Before they can fix a problem, they must thoroughly comprehend it. The critical first step is pinpointing the connectivity hurdles beneath them. And for Giga, this entails mapping school locations as well as levels of connectivity and coverage. Where are the schools, how well, if at all, are they covered by current networks, and are they even connected, is the connectivity significant, What obstacles stand in their way if they are not connected?

They have helped Giga establish a foundation that has helped connect more than two million children and students globally and has the potential to help connect millions more, all to financial support and the knowledge of data scientists.

Mapping the availability of internet access across the world's schools has developed into a crucial tool that allows Giga to identify gaps and prioritise resources and actions accordingly. It serves as a springboard for building such connections.

They could do this because of cutting-edge techniques and data pipelines created by our data scientists, which Giga currently uses to map the mobile network coverage of 466,371 distinct school locations in 34 different nations. Organisations are shedding light on the disconnected and allowing them to be seen by doing this, often for the first time.

A crucial component of that approach has also been the involvement and dedication of a larger workforce base. They have enlisted the assistance of every one of their employees worldwide to assist Giga in developing its mapping solutions by tagging school sites from satellite pictures. The outcomes assist Giga in developing crucial machine-learning algorithms that can help automate locating schools using satellite imagery. Their personnel validated 1,500 photos of schools in South Africa, Costa Rica, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Kenya, and Brazil a whopping 150,538 times individually.

Not Just Connectivity, Need for Meaningful Connectivity

To enable relevant use cases, connectivity must be high quality and speed. Following the advice in the Broadband Commission's Connected Learning Spaces: Possibilities for Hybrid Learning report from last year, Giga has determined that 20 Mbps should be the minimum standard for schools to support meaningful educational use cases like working online, watching online videos, supporting multiple video streams per school, and enabling access to cloud-based apps.

Together with the Giga team, Ericsson's developers co-created an innovative application that is currently being used to monitor and evaluate school connectivity regularly to assess and monitor connectivity performance in schools. To track service quality, identify areas for improvement, and hold service providers accountable, the application transmits data speeds from schools to UNICEF servers.

By using innovation, strong collaborations, and a desire to transform the world for the better. This plan offers any way to address the issue of school connectivity and give hundreds of millions of students a chance to have a brighter future.