“We dream of climbing the ladder; to get there, we have to do our job better”: Designing for Teacher Aspirations in rural Côte d’Ivoire

As governments in developing countries race to solve the global learning crisis, a key focus is on novel teaching approaches as taught in pedagogical programs. To scale, these pedagogical programs rely on government teacher training infrastructure. However, these programs face challenges in rural parts of Africa where there is a lack of advisor support, teachers are isolated and technology infrastructure is still emerging. Conversational agents have addressed some of these challenges by scaling expert knowledge and providing personalized interactions, but it is unclear how this work can translate to rural African contexts. To explore the use of such technology in this design space, we conducted two related studies. The first was a qualitative study with 20 teachers and ministry officials in rural Côte d’Ivoire to understand opportunities and challenges in technology use for these stakeholders. Second, we shared a conversational agent probe over WhatsApp to 38 teachers for 14-weeks to better understand what we learned in the survey and to uncover realistic use cases from these stakeholders. Our findings were examined through a theoretical lens of aspirations to discover sustainable design directions for conversational agents to support teachers in low infrastructure settings.