Word2Mouth - An eLearning platform catered for Low-Income Countries

The United Nation's 4th Sustainable Development Goal aims to provide quality education to all. Unfortunately, currently it is too often the case that learners from Low-Income Countries (LICs) cannot access relevant educational resources. Low bandwidth, low literacy and different cultural backgrounds often cause barriers of entry to access to education for learners in LICs.Conversely, learning environments have changed dramatically in the last decade. With the rise of eLearning platforms such as Coursera and edX, a learner can now stream high quality Open Educational Resources (OERs) right from their own home, as long as they have a stable Internet connection. With over 100 million participants worldwide, eLearning platforms provide alternatives to conventional classroom education, democratising education for everyone. But do these new learning environments really improve access to education in LICs?Research shows that unforeseen differences in Internet access, language, literacy, and cultural backgrounds between learners from High-Income and Low-Income Countries (HICs/LICs) mean that eLearning is often inaccessible for people in LICs. In this paper, we describe Word2Mouth, an eLearning platform that has been designed specifically to overcome the barriers of entry to eLearning for LICs, educating learners in LICs in a way that current eLearning platforms fail to do.