Características y rasgos personales del maestro

CHW experiences with smartphones were not without struggles. Most of them were related either to data services, typing on a touchscreen interface, or interacting with the devices in English.

At one of the workshops, a 66-year-old CHW arrived very early to request assistance because she was confused by the process of buying data bundles necessary to restore the WhatsApp service that she relied on to communicate with her children in South Africa.

She arrived frantically saying:

“A K’u Nkenyetse Li-Megabiti Ngoanaka!” - “Please Help Me Load the Megabytes, my child!” – CHW5, HC1, (Aged 66)

Her data bundle had been depleted and she had received many messages from the network service provider about data bundles and special offers. Most the messages were in English and confusing to her; all she knew was that someone told her to load something called Li-Megabiti—Megabytes—and then her WhatsApp would work again.

CHWs had received a short video in the BH app that described the internet in a simple manner that clarified terminology including megabytes, data bundles, etc. Nevertheless, the CHW was still confused. As Medhi and Toyama, (2007) also found, technical instructional videos like these are difficult to follow for people with low digital literacy, especially when the instruction is high-level and is not contextualised for improved

understanding and relatability. In this case, we assisted the CHW with purchasing data bundles and showed her to do it in the future. We used examples related to cooking to make her understand the concept of buying data bundles using prepaid airtime.

The entire data cost management system was foreign and confusing for many CHWs to understand. Additionally, most of the CHWs could not afford enough data bundles to stay constantly online. For example, CHWs liked to use WhatsApp, and the app was installed on all their devices. For many, though, the cost of data bundles often forced them to remain offline. When asked how much they could afford to spend on airtime and calling, CHWs’ responses ranged from LSL 30 to LSL 100 a month (2-8 USD). The average they could afford (LSL 40) only buys about 200MB of data a month.

Some CHWs mentioned that they periodically switched off mobile data services on their phones because the phones would “eat up the data” otherwise. Wyche at al. also found that Zambian farmers faced the same challenge (Wyche, Densmore and Geyer, 2015). As a result, the CHWs would only switch data services on a few times a day to check WhatsApp messages. We often helped CHWs to switch off any background updates and data-consuming processes on the phones, but most still could not afford to have data services running constantly. About 40% of the CHWs actively used WhatsApp, while others said they gave up because it was “too hard”. What frustrated CHWs about WhatsApp on the Windows Phone devices was the frequent need to update the app. This process was not straightforward for the CHWs. To update the app, it is necessary to go to the app store and enter a Microsoft email address and password. These steps had to be taken every time an update was required. On setup, the password had to be a ‘strong’

password with alphanumerical and special characters—which some CHWs struggled to input.

Another challenge with smartphones (and smartphone services) for CHWs was limited English literacy (Doke and Joshi, 2015). At different times in the study, CHWs uninstalled the BH app and when asked, admitted that:

“Sometimes the phone brings up English messages I do not understand [asking to confirm an uninstall, for example], so I just press whatever I can press to remove

that English message [then uninstall unintentionally].” – CHW 30, HC2

Figure 32 - Uninstall Prompt in English.

On the devices used by the CHWs, there was no Sesotho language option. Even if there had been, we had previously found that the Sesotho translations on phones are incomprehensible and confusing. The feature phones previously used by the CHWs had a Sesotho language option, but CHWs preferred to use English (even with their limited English literacy) because the Sesotho version was too confusing. To fit within the existing menus and labels of the mobile interface, translations from English to Sesotho were often too short and thus incomprehensible. If the translation were to be comprehensible, the Sesotho equivalent would be too long to be accommodated within the existing interface.

Native OS translations often go with the former (short, direct translations that are not immediately understandable). In the BH Sesotho app that we designed, however, we designed buttons and labels with this challenge in mind. We were sure to provide the necessary space in the designs for long Sesotho phrases. We did not directly map English words into Sesotho equivalents (as described and demonstrated in Section 3.4.3.).

Instead, we allowed for long phrases that captured more comprehensible meaning. For example, a button that could have been labelled “Start Recording” in English had to be labelled “Penya Mona Ebe U Qala Ho Bua” in Sesotho, to be understood – which literally means “Press Here and The Begin Speaking”. A shorter, more direct translation would not have been easily comprehensible to the CHWs.

6.4 PERSONAL AND NON-PRESCRIBED USES OF