Mobile Phones and the Uses of Learning in a Training Intervention for Kenyan Community Health Workers

Mobile phones help move training programmes out of the classroom and into community settings where CHWs live and work. This chapter examines what happens to ‘learning’ when training becomes ‘mobile’. To explore this, an analysis of a three-year intervention to train 90 Kenyan CHWs is drawn from science and technology studies (STS). It is argued that when a mobile learning application is deployed in an informal urban settlement and an isolated rural village, its movement makes it available for many more uses than is originally envisioned. These varied uses subject the CHWs to multiple definitions of what it means to learn and conflicting visions of how learning leads to social change. The chapter ends with a discussion of how power circulates through global health policies, mobile devices, CHWs, and the material conditions of extreme poverty to generate controversies over what knowledge matters most for health worker training programmes, and for the broader aims of international development.