Emergency Remote Education in Nigeria: Challenges and Design Opportunities

There are currently approximately 20.2 million children in Nigeria out of school, exacerbated by ongoing conflicts demonstrating an ongoing need for Emergency Remote Education (ERE). Despite this, Nigeria remains an under-explored context and the specific challenges of providing ERE there are not fully understood. This paper reports on a mixed methods study of teachers experiences of enacting ERE in Nigeria in April 2020 with a questionnaire (n=374), diary study and follow up interviews (n=20) carried out. The contributions of the paper are two-fold; firstly, an in-depth study of ERE in Nigeria, demonstrating that teachers used WhatsApp as a tool of practical necessity, configured it to create a continued sense of place, and continued to enact largely traditional pedagogies. Secondly, through reflection on these findings, we offer initial design considerations for technology use in ERE in low resource settings before outlining continuing design challenges for HCI researchers in this context.