ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how mobile phones can play a unique role in reaching those who are outside the scope of formal or institutionalized schooling and open doors to out-of-school learning practices for people positioned on the periphery. Daily observations of female behavior, literacy classes for adults, family situations, cell phone use and informal conversations were written down in a fieldwork diary, to further support the qualitative and quantitative data. The explosive spread of mobile phones all around the world has created new hopes as to how the handsets could transform the fortunes of poor living in developing countries in the peripheral zones of the world. In a South African context a 'wendy house' refers to a wooden house built by low-income earners, often erected in the backyard of residential premises. Wesbank is situated on the dry and sandy Cape Flats, the so-called dumping grounds of apartheid, kilometers out of the center of Cape Town and surrounded by many other apartheid townships.
