Dr. Bello-Bravo’s research interests lie at the intersection of effective communication and education, specializing in informal education and communication strategies to reach low- or non-literate learners in developing and developed countries. Areas of research include identifying, developing, and deploying scalable strategies for effective educational knowledge transfer and solution uptake to the approximately 800 million low- and non-literate learners globally. Much of her research involves rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa—over a dozen countries to date—investigating the appeal and learning gains delivered by animated educational videos viewed on mobile phones. Deceptively simple in principle, when translated into locally fluent, dialectically accurate languages, these educational interventions have helped to discover and disclose a variety of means, approaches, and techniques that enable marginalized communities in rural areas to access information that can improve their lives, their communities, and their environment in sustainable ways. Future research includes developing further means to scale-up this educational delivery, to increase through-put and access for anyone with a video-enabled cellphone and access to the Internet who wishes to share educational knowledge in their own community, to collaborate further with global and local knowledge-holders in the development of locally feasible solutions to problems affecting countless communities globally, and especially to empower the disempowered, disenfranchised, marginalized, or simply overlooked people at a grassroots level so as to enable everyone’s access to more economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable solutions to problems facing them and the world.
