Zero counts - A Cash-Based Approach to Testing Numeracy Skills and Learning Strategies in Rural Sierra Leone

Understanding the meaning of zero in the place-value system is one of the hardest cognitive hurdles in understanding this system for children and illiterate adults. The concept that a number increases in magnitude (e.g., 10 vs 100) when adding literally nothing − i.e., zero − is counterintuitive to those who have received no formal education. This is a substantial problem: Approximately one billion adults world-wide, of whom two-thirds are women, cannot read or write multi-digit numbers (3-digits or more in length) such as those appearing in any financial process (e.g., on cash, bank statements, or ATM interfaces). As a result, this uniquely vulnerable population is trapped in the informal sector, unable to safely access formal financial institutions or many other public and private services. Nevertheless, illiterate people can deal with zero, when it comes to one domain: Cash. When supported by concrete bank notes identifiable by visual clues, many people can differentiate 10 from 100 from 1000. In a partnership between University of Western Ontario, the not-for-profit social enterprise My Oral Village, Inc. (MOVE), Tübingen University, and the Irish League of Credit Unions International Development Foundation (ILCUF), field research will be conducted in Sierra Leone to evaluate the outcome of a specialized oral information management (OIM) savings and credit passbook. This evaluation will be conducted with a test battery assessing comprehension of the concept of zero in both monetary concrete (depiction of banknotes) and monetary abstract (depiction of monetary magnitudes with Arabic digits) settings. The test battery comprises well-established tasks of numerical cognition such as transcoding spoken numbers to written digits, numberline estimation and symbolic magnitude comparison. The sample will consist of 100 members of ILCUF’s ‘graduation microfinance’ (GMF) program from across Sierra Leone. With only GMF participants in Conakry Dee using the OIM passbook, we can split the sample into an OIM ‘treatment’ group and a control group to assess differences in functional numeracy. Of these 100 participants, 10 will be selected for an additional semi-structured standardized interview addressing further conceptual questions to advance the insights from the quantitative analysis of test results.