The project

In Burkina Faso in rural villages primary schools, if they exist, are overcrowded (more than 50 child per class). Classrooms are often not enough, and several classes are combined in the same classroom. School attendance is collected manually. There is no structured and analytical sharing system. We developed for CIAI an application for identifying correctly the male or female gender of children inside a classroom using a cheap smartphone camera without internet connection. Face recognition is an artificial intelligence technique, used in biometrics to identify or verify a person's identity from one or more images. We developed one specific tool to improve and make the attendance register more reliable the tool is called “Cheese2school - c2s”, and allows to register students school attendance with a simple photo or short video of the class. The teacher takes a photo, the app recognises students and registers their presence.

The smartphone application allows teachers to speed up the collection of school presences and make the process more effective. About 2000 photographs were collected during our first mission in Burkina Faso, using two digital cameras: one for females, and one for males. In this way we were sure to make a classification already at the origin. In the second mission, in November 2019, we held training for all the stakeholder involved in the project, the teachers who collect data with the mobile app, and the mobilizers who will monitor data through the web app.