onebillion Numeracy App — Afar-Language Maths Learning for Primary Pupils in Dubti, Ethiopia

onebillion's onecourse app delivers self-paced, adaptive literacy and numeracy lessons on low-cost tablets, designed to let children progress with minimal teacher input in low-resource classrooms. Since 2017, a deployment in Dubti and Samara — towns in Ethiopia's Afar Region — has taught basic numeracy to primary-age children in Afar, a language rarely served by education technology, through a partnership with VSO Ethiopia.

Children learn with support from teachers and teaching assistants using the onecourse app on tablets.

onebillion's own project page reports that the Dubti/Samara deployment has reached roughly 250 children, but publishes no pre/post test scores, comparison group or effect size for this specific site. Elsewhere, onebillion's software has been through genuine RCTs: in Malawi, an 8-month RCT with the University of Nottingham found an additional 5.3 months of literacy learning versus a control group, with similar gains for girls and boys; in the UK, an EEF-funded RCT evaluated by the University of Oxford found three months' additional progress in maths; and a 2019 Global Learning XPRIZE field trial in Tanzania raised the share of children able to read a word from under 10% to 45% over 15 months.

None of these rigorous, independently registered studies covers the Ethiopia site, so its own impact remains undemonstrated even though the underlying software has a genuine evidence base elsewhere — real reach in an underserved, minority-language pastoralist region, but without site-specific evidence.