Access to literacy is critical to children's futures, but formal education may be insufficient for fostering early literacy, especially in low-resource contexts. Educational technologies used at home may be able to help, but it is unclear whether or how children (and families) will use such technologies at home in rural communities, particularly in low-literate families. In this paper, we investigate these questions with a voice-based literacy technology deployed with families in 8 rural communities in Côte d'Ivoire for 4 months. We use interviews and observations with 37 families to investigate motivations, methods, and barriers for rural families' engagement with a literacy technology accessible via feature phones. We contribute insights into how families view digital literacy as a learning goal, leverage networks of supporters, and over time, transition from explicit to implicit support for children's learning.

Teaching is challenging in rural areas in developing countries because of large classroom sizes, limited basic infrastructure, and lack of teacher training. Teachers' impact on educational outcomes can be improved by teacher training programs but these programs are limited by poor infrastructure in rural areas. Although infrastructural challenges can be overcome by information technology today, it is unclear how such technology can support teacher training. Therefore to explore opportunities for teacher training in rural developing contexts with technology, we conducted interviews and observations with 22 primary school teachers in two regions of rural Côte d'Ivoire. We followed an aspirations-based approach that focuses on the user's aspirations (long term desires) to help understand teachers' intrinsic desire to grow in their professional life. We found that teacher aspirations conflict with their current role but their solidarity helps them find education role models who balance this conflict. We found that teachers face challenges in teacher training but they handle issues through their solidarity and by creating solutions. We then discuss ways to measure impact on aspirations, designing for conflicting aspirations and to leverage aspirations to create a social change in teacher training using technology.