Despite improvements in school enrolment over the past 20 years, 757 million adults worldwide are still unable to read and write in any language (UNESCO 2015). In Niger, the subject of this study, less than 30% of the population is considered to be literate (IMF 2013). While a substantial body of research has focused on increasing school participation, there is still considerable debate about how to improve learning in a cost-effective way. One constraint that has consistently emerged is teacher absenteeism: In West Africa, teacher absenteeism rates range between 27-40% (TI 2013). Empirical research in economics has found that teacher monitoring can lead to improvements in teacher attendance, with mixed results on learning (Guerrero et al 2013, Duflo et al 2012, Cilliers et al 2014). Some governments have shifted to community teachers, who are hired on short-term contracts renewable upon performance. Yet oversight remains a challenge, especially in countries with high transport costs and weak institutions. In a previous adult education program in Niger, community teachers missed 1/3 of their classes (Aker et al 2016). The growth of mobile phone technology throughout sub-Saharan Africa has the potential to affect the relationships between teachers, communities and education service providers in remote rural areas. By allowing governments and NGOs to communicate with remote areas on a regular basis, mobile phones can improve monitoring of teachers' attendance. Mobile phones can also allow the community to provide feedback to education providers, thereby increasing community engagement. And finally, mobile phones could be used to provide more frequent "long distance" pedagogical support to teachers. Our research team ran a randomized evaluation in Niger between 2014-2016, which showed that a mobile phone monitoring intervention in the context of an adult education program - whereby teachers, students and village chiefs were called on a weekly basis - significantly improved students' test scores (Aker et al 2016). Although the intervention did not include financial incentives for teachers, mobile monitoring increased teachers' attendance and motivation. At the same time, teachers often asked for pedagogical support, which the monitoring team was unable to provide. This proposal builds upon this initial research in five ways. First, it will expand the program to more villages in order to test the intervention at a larger scale. Second, the research will test different types of mobile monitoring - i.e., calling the teacher only, as compared with calling the teacher, the village chief and students - to determine which approach is the most effective in increasing teacher performance and learning. Third, the program will assess the potential for using mobile phones to provide pedagogical support to teachers. Fourth, our research will seek to understand how education and technology affect intra-village dynamics, as well as the dynamics between the teacher, community and education service providers. And finally, these interventions will be piloted in a small number of primary schools in order to understand whether the dynamics of teacher monitoring and support are different in a primary school setting and with governmental institutions. This research contributes to the existing literature in several ways. First, the intervention uses a low-cost technology that does not require specialized software. It also builds upon existing research on teacher performance by including pedagogical support and omitting the financial incentive. Finally, our research will focus on adult education programs, a highly neglected entry point for education interventions. This research will be achieved through a unique collaboration between governmental, non-governmental, university and research firm partners in Niger, the US and Europe.

Despite improvements in school enrolment over the past 20 years, 781 million adults worldwide are still unable to read and write in any language (UNESCO 2015). In Niger, the subject of this study, less than 30% of the population is considered to be literate (IMF 2013). While a substantial body of research has focused on increasing school participation, there is still considerable debate about how to improve learning in a cost-effective way. One constraint that has consistently emerged is teacher absenteeism: In West Africa, teacher absenteeism rates range between 27-40% (TI 2013). Empirical research in economics has found that teacher monitoring can lead to improvements in teacher attendance, with mixed results on learning (Guerrero et al 2013, Duflo et al 2012, Cilliers et al 2014). The growth of mobile phone technology throughout sub-Saharan Africa has the potential to affect the relationships between teachers, communities and education service providers in remote rural areas. By allowing governments to communicate with remote areas on a regular basis, mobile phones can improve the management of teachers' attendance. Mobile phones can also allow the community to provide feedback to education providers, thereby increasing community engagement. Under a current DFID-ESRC grant, our research team is conducting a randomized control trial in Niger that provides mobile phone-based "monitoring" and pedagogical support to community teachers in the context of an NGO-implemented adult education program - whereby teachers, students and village chiefs are called on a weekly basis. A prior study showed that these simple weekly phone calls could increase adult students' reading and math skills by .12-.15 s.d. as compared with the standard adult education curriculum (Aker et al 2019). It is somewhat striking that this simple intervention led to changes in learning outcomes, especially without any financial incentives for teachers. During our current work, we learned that similar challenges confront the primary school system in Niger; limited budgets, long distances and teacher contracts often make it difficult for the Ministry and school directors to monitor and provide support to teachers. It is estimated that 49% of primary school teachers miss any school in a month, often between 1-3 days (Malam Maman 2016). This proposal seeks to explore new but related avenues in our existing research in three ways. First, we will pilot the mobile phone-based approach in a different educational context, namely primary schools. Second, we will seek to understand what types of mobile engagement - i.e., calling the teacher only, as compared with calling the teacher, school director, village chief and parents - are the most effective in reducing teacher absenteeism and increasing learning. And third, we will seek to better understand the mechanisms through which phone calls could affect teachers, students and communities by carefully measuring teacher attendance and motivation, student attendance and learning and parental involvement. This research contributes to the existing literature in several ways. First, the intervention uses a relatively low-cost technology that does not require specialized software. In addition, it expands upon existing studies on teacher performance, but without providing a financial incentive (Guerrero et al 2013, Cueto et al 2008, Glewwe et al 2010, Muralidharan and Sundararaman 2011, Duflo et al 2012, Muralidharan et al 2014, Cilliers et al 2018). Our research will also speak to the literature on community participation and learning outcomes (Jimenez and Sawada, Banerjee et al 2010, Beasley and Huillery 2016). This research will be achieved through a unique collaboration between governmental, university and research firm partners in Niger and the US.

Superhydrophobic surfaces (SH surfaces, or SHS) are a special breed of surfaces, arising in natural settings or increasingly in man-made synthetic situations, which are unusually slippery. In nature, superhydrophobicity manifests itself as the so-called "lotus-leaf effect": water beads up on a lotus leaf and readily slips off. This slippery feature can be supremely useful in a rich panoply of engineering applications, including direct attempts to emulate this effect in man-made superhydrophobic coatings, or using the effect to promote easier passage of fluids in driven flows (drag reduction). It has been proposed recently, however, that these attractive drag reduction properties in driven flows can quickly be compromised by the presence of surfactants, or impurities in the fluids that quickly aggregate at the fluid surfaces, even in trace amounts. This means that their presence is virtually unavoidable. It is therefore critical to assess the extent of this impediment, whether it can be mitigated, and even whether the deliberate addition of surfactants can be leveraged to attain desired objectives, such as enhanced drag reduction, flow stabilisation, or even mass transport. This is the topic of our proposal. The main goals of this proposal are to (a) quantitatively assess the extent to which the slip properties of a surface are compromised by the presence of surfactants for internal channel flows in the laminar flow regime; (b) study whether a possible "remobilisation" of interfaces already studied in the context of surfactant-laden bubbles can play a useful role in drag reduction involving superhydrophobic surfaces; (c) explore, both theoretically and experimentally, how a special class of surfactants deliberately added to the fluid, and controllable (or "tunable") by external light stimuli, can affect the slip properties of superhydrophobic surfaces; (d) explore how the stability of laminar flows over SHS is affected by the presence of surfactant, both soluble and insoluble, and whether incipient instabilities can be controlled by light actuation; (e) examine, both theoretically and experimentally, mass/particle transport using Marangoni stresses associated with light-actuated surfactants as a propulsion mechanism. While light-actuated surfactants have been studied before, the novelty of our proposal lies in their deployment in the setting of superhydrophobic surfaces and their use as a control mechanism both for sustained drag reduction, elimination of instability, and as a mechanism for strategic mass transfer. The fundamental insights from our proposed work packages will have broad implications for a variety of applications of SHS ranging from drag reduction and self-cleaning surfaces to controllable drug delivery in emerging healthcare technologies.

Advancing our understanding of the soil ecosystem, especially the dynamics of nitrogen species, is critical for improving soil fertility, increasing crop productivity, managing greenhouse gas fluxes, and protecting environmental quality. This project presents convergent research to develop the next generation, integrated sensing system for large area, in situ, high resolution spatio-temporal monitoring of dynamic nitrogen species, specifically ammonium and nitrate, as well as soil moisture, potassium and salinity. The wireless Distributed Real Time Soil (DiRTS) monitoring network is comprised of (1) soil-penetrable sensor motes with advanced microfluidics mimicking plant root-like water intake, (2) robust electrochemical sensors for ammonium, nitrate, potassium and salinity utilizing ultra-low power circuit architectures for readout and digitization, (3) long range wireless data communication using emerging standards, and (4) advanced algorithms for geospatial mapping of soil mineral nitrogen, potassium, salinity and moisture. The platform will address fundamental weaknesses in our understanding and control of nitrogen species in both unmanaged (e.g. forest) and managed (e.g. agriculture) soils. Beyond the technical impact, the proposed research effort will offer educational and training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students through innovative curriculum and for farmers and other soil management practitioners through publicly available training modules on design and deployment of the wireless Distributed Real Time Soil (DiRTS) monitoring platform. The DiRTS platform will make several notable scientific contributions: (1) Continuous capillary-driven sampling of the target soil nutrients mimicking the natural water intake by roots and transpiration through aboveground plant parts; (2) Ion sensitive electrodes utilizing embedded desalination to improve selectivity, and utilizing redundancy and Bayesian calibration to improve sensitivity; (3) Circuits for readout and digitization operating below 0.5V power supply and nanowatt level power dissipation; (4) Event-driven sampling and wireless communication using probabilistic sensor scheduling based on available power and data importance; and (5) State of the art statistical machine learning based approaches for generating high resolution spatio-temporal chemical maps from irregularly sampled data. All technology will be validated using actual, in-situ measurements of the target variable using the sensing mote and DET/DGT sensors in an experimental forest-BIFoR-FACE of the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research. Following validation, the sensing mote will then be fitted inside greenhouse gas auto-chambers in the FACE facility for concomittant sensing of dynamic nitrogen species and N2O fluxes to be monitored using a PICARO greenhouse gas analyzer and mapped using DiRTS sensor network. This proposal brings together experts in engineering, biogeosciences and chemistry from the US and UK, with strong backgrounds and expertise in relevant areas of sensing, electronics, microfluidics, biogeochemistry, soil science, signal processing and sensor networks, for successful execution of this project.

Education is essential for economic and social development. Yet over 775 million adults worldwide are unable to read and write in any language (UNESCO 2012). These indicators are particularly low in the landlocked countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where literacy rates are less than 40 percent. In Niger, the subject of our study, fewer than 30 percent of the population is literate, with large discrepancies between men and women. Despite the immediate private and social returns to adult education, adult education programs are a highly neglected entry point for development interventions. This is often attributed to low enrollment, high drop-out and rapid skills depreciation (Romain and Armstrong 1987, Abadzi 1994, Oxenham et al 2002, Ortega and Rodriguez 2008), possibly due to the limited relevance of such skills in daily life or limited opportunities to practice in one's native language. The widespread growth of mobile phone coverage in many developing countries, including Niger, has the potential to increase the incentives for and facilitate the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills by illiterate adults. By teaching students how to use mobile phones, adult learners may be able to practice their literacy skills outside of class by sending and receiving short message services (SMS), making phone calls and using mobile money (m-money) applications, all of which require basic fluency with the numbers, symbols and letters on mobile phone keypads. Mobile phone technology could also affect returns to education by allowing households to use the technology for other purposes, such as obtaining price and labor market information and facilitating informal private transfers (Aker and Mbiti 2010). Our research team ran a successful randomized evaluation in Niger in 2009-2011 (Project ABC) and showed that a mobile phone-enhanced adult education program improved literacy and math skills of adult education participants by 19-25 s.d., equivalent to an additional year of education (Aker et al 2012). This difference remains significant over time, even as learning depreciates. Building upon the successful pilot program, this research will provide rigorous evidence on the impacts of adult education programs on educational and socio-economic outcomes in Niger. Yet more importantly, this research will assess the extent to which information technology - in particular, mobile phones -- can affect learning outcomes and households' asset ownership, ability to deal with shocks and farm and off-farm earnings. This will be achieved by including two variations of the basic education intervention. The first variation will teach students in the basic adult education course how to use mobile phones, similar to a previous pilot program in Niger. The second intervention will also provide educational content to adult learners via short message service (SMS), thereby allowing us to measure the extent to which information technology can be used as a distance-learning tool. In addition to its impacts on adult learning, this research will also investigate the extent to which adult education influences parents' investments in children's educational outcomes and which education affects intra-household and intra-village decision-making. And finally, since the research will be conducted in an expanded study population (250 villages, as compared with 117 in the pilot), we will be able to assess the scalability of the approach, thus allowing us to directly address the first overarching research question set out in this call for proposal ("What approaches are most effective in enabling the poorest to exit and stay out of poverty, and under what conditions can such approaches be replicated elsewhere and at scale?") This research will be achieved through a unique collaboration between Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and researchers at Tufts University, the University of Ottawa, the London School of Economics and the University of Abdoul Moumouni.