Hi Nicky - my first after school club that I ran with learners from three schools servicing learners in very poor communities involved provision of 'travel money' based on the taxi fare to and from the club venue. While it was a small amount of money refunded (R20 per learner per session) I did notice that students would tend to walk and save the taxi money. I do think this provided a small incentive to the Grade 11 and 12 learners I was mentoring however it was not sufficient to have students who had little interest in the maths learning walk all the way for the money. Though my suspicion is some of the learners who chose not to participate in clubs (partly because the clubs did not do whole class teaching but rather students had to bring the specific problems they had tried themselves/in groups) might have come had the travel payment been higher. I think for me in that club the amount was perfectly in balance with encouraging/supporting those with sufficient self motivation and mathematical interest.

Looking forward to hearing others comments on this issue. 

Thanks Mellony. Its interesting as the concept of 'cash transfer' has been used successfully in several low income contexts for positive behavior change - especially tough-to-shift social behaviors. Interesting also that the amounts you refer to for high school clubs are small. I know of another example where R2 airtime was used an incentive for collecting mathematics points. With Microsoft math just the chance to win R50 airtime in a lucky draw from meeting a specified points threshold within a set period showed greater learning activity. The cash transfer examples I know about are  related to social grants (in Brazil), and school attendance for adolescent girls (Malawi and South Africa). It is a concept being explored by WHO for healthy living, and written about by DFID (amongst others). The South African EPWP model is a bit like this but targets out of school youth and unemployed adults. I am wondering about informal learning motivation and mechanisms to further support/encourage  such behaviour. I am also thinking about the cross over between virtual gamification (and getting rewards which are 'virtual cash' to allow the decoration of a room, or modifying an avatar in online worlds, collecting milestones, vouchers, trophies...histories of achievement as motivators in social media spaces) ...and how this comes to be or not in face-to-face voluntary informal learning spaces such as maths clubs. Of course I take this down to early grade level and mathematics :) where children in poor communities miss the social and cultural capital dished out in affluent homes...Any one with examples of a kind of 'cash transfer' for homework or learning task completion from non-commercial m-learning or gaming environments where learners in poor communities are the target?

Yes all very interesting and I like the notion of online rewards in relation to the touch screen activities that we want to investigate further for use with our primary learners. I'm interested to read further on the Malawi/SA incentives for adolescent girls and school attendance - was this through NGO's?

Thanks this is helpful to know about the Phillippines experience - thank you for sharing with us.