PAJEF — Digital Literacy Project for Girls & Women

The Projet d'Alphabétisation des Jeunes Filles et Jeunes Femmes (PAJEF) was launched by UNESCO's Dakar office in January 2012 with the Senegalese government, targeting 40,000 neo-literate and illiterate girls and women aged 15-55 across the seven regions most affected by illiteracy (Dakar, Diourbel, Fatick, Kédougou, Matam, Saint-Louis and Tambacounda), funded by a $750,000-$1,000,000 grant from Procter & Gamble's Always brand alongside UNESCO.

The project aimed to raise literacy among girls and women in the regions most affected by illiteracy, and from 2013 to test whether adding digital kits and mass-media broadcasting could boost engagement and post-literacy skills.

In 2012 the project enrolled 3,998 girls and women in 193 face-to-face literacy classes and recruited 2,300 participants into a parallel online strand, while training 110 teachers, 66 literacy coaches and 45 facilitators. From June 2013, classrooms in Dakar, Diourbel and Matam were equipped with digital kits — a laptop, interactive projector and infrared stylus — to deliver adapted literacy software, alongside a television programme reaching an estimated 30,000 women.

UNESCO's Effective Literacy and Numeracy Practices Database records that 96% of girls in the programme passed their primary-school-equivalent exam or progressed to the next level, and 84% of 93 candidates passed the lower-secondary exam; nearly 1,000 girls received dropout-prevention support.

Following these results, UNESCO extended similar ICT-literacy projects to Kenya and Nigeria from 2014.