While policymakers continue to debate infrastructure delivery and curriculum reform, South Africa’s learners have already moved. Across townships, rural villages, and dense urban settlements, many are no longer waiting for textbooks to arrive or classrooms to be fully staffed. They are quietly building their own learning ecosystems, one download, one tutorial, one voice note at a time.
The most consistent tool in their hands is a mobile device.
Smartphones and tablets, often shared among siblings or used after school hours, are no longer supplementary in education. For thousands of students, especially in under-resourced communities, it has become the primary gateway to learning.
Education has already gone mobile. The system just hasn’t caught up.
In 2023, the PIRLS 2021 assessment found that 81 percent of South African Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning. This was the worst performance among the 57 countries assessed, and it reflected the largest decline from previous years. While this learning crisis is cause for national concern, it does not tell the full story.
In homes without libraries and schools without labs, learners are finding their own way forward. Many are turning to mobile devices to close the education gap. They are watching maths explainers on YouTube, revising through WhatsApp study groups, using free exam prep apps, and accessing shared resources in PDFs and voice notes. Mobile learning has expanded what’s possible beyond the classroom. It allows learners to access content, test themselves, and stay connected to their studies, whether they are commuting, sharing space with siblings, or studying late into the night.
This reflects how many South African learners are already making education work, on their own terms, and often without the support of formal infrastructure.
The research is catching up to the reality
A 2024 township study by Kunene and Tsibolane found that many high school learners spend more than five hours a day on their phones. While not all of that time is academic, students consistently expressed interest in using their devices for schoolwork, especially when apps, tools, and structure supported it. The desire to learn is clear, so is the digital fluency. What is still missing is formal recognition that mobile tools are now central to the way students access education.
Mobile-first tools are reshaping learning behaviour
What’s changing is how mobile tools are helping learners take control of their own progress. They can pause and replay lessons, search for extra explanations, and go back over content until it makes sense. In places where formal learning is limited or inconsistent, this kind of flexibility gives learners a real advantage. Mobile access supports deeper focus and allows them to shape their learning around their own pace and needs.
To support this shift, mobile tools must meet three core needs: portability, performance, and resilience. Devices must be easy to carry between school and home, strong enough to handle multitasking, and reliable under real-world conditions that include power outages and limited data. Features like long battery life, offline access, and the ability to switch seamlessly between apps are now educational essentials.
Designing for how learning actually happens
At OPPO, we have seen first-hand how learning is becoming more self-directed, more digital, and more decentralised. Devices like the OPPO Pad SE are designed around that reality. With its lightweight build, extended battery performance, and capacity for multitasking, it reflects how learners actually study, moving between video and notes, switching apps to compare content, and storing materials for later offline use.
Rethinking what counts as infrastructure
Mobile technology has become a foundation for learning in South Africa, especially for students who lack consistent access to traditional resources. It opens the door to content, supports self-paced study, and builds the digital confidence learners need to succeed beyond the classroom.
As more students turn to their devices to fill the gaps in the system, the responsibility falls on all of us, technology providers, educators, policymakers to ensure those tools are accessible, reliable, and built with real learners in mind.
To close the education gap, we need to give learners the tools that help them study wherever they are. Mobile learning creates real access and opens up new possibilities for progress.