The British Government has joined forces with the six largest mobile operators in Bangladesh to unveil the world’s largest project to teach a language using mobile phones.

The country may once have formed part of the British Empire, but learning how to speak English in Bangladesh is not easy. Years of fervant nationalism discouraged English speaking. As a result, even most of the country's English teachers have only a tenous grasp of a language that the Bangladesh Government now admits is necessary to do business with the world.

Starting this week a scheme managed by the BBC World Service and funded by the British Government will offer the 50 million Bangladeshis who own mobile handsets the opportunity to dial up a series of three-minute-long English lessons for 3 takas (2.5p) each — less than the cost of a cup of tea at a roadside stall in Dhaka.

The venture, which is part of a £50 million drive funded by the British Government to promote English speaking in Bangladesh, is one of the most ambitious yet in the growing "m-learning" sector. Similar projects include Nokia's Life Tools business, which offers educational services alongside farming news and astrology updates through handsets in India.

The BBC mobile tutorials will be updated every week and supported by a website and a television soap opera set in Bangladesh and Britain. The lessons are designed to equip young Bangladeshis for white collar jobs, help small businessmen improve communication with overseas clients and assist housewives in tutoring children. The low charges — essential in a country where much of the target audience earns less than £2 a day — are possible because of deals forged with Bangladesh's six main mobile phone operators, who are cutting their standard rates by half. Its creators say the mobile project, called Janala (Bengali for window), has the potential to boost an export-dependent economy that is being stymied by a chronic lack of English speakers and a creaking education system.

With three billion mobile phones now in use globally (compared to 1.5 billion television sets), the use of handsets as educational tools is increasingly being explored.

In the Philippines, some teachers can request educational video content via text message, which is then delivered to a television at the school via satellite. In Thailand, graduate students sit tests via text message, while in Japan — where mobile phones outnumber computers five-to-one — handsets have been used for several years to teach English as a second language. One survey found that 70 per cent of Japanese students preferred receiving lessons on mobile phones than on computers.

Mobile learning may be particularly useful in countries where populations are widely dispersed, such as in Mongolia, where special English lessons have been developed for waiters and bank tellers, which are distributed through text messages.

The uptake of technology comes amid fears that large parts of the developing world face an education crisis.

In Bangladesh, as much as 30 per cent of children make no real progress in learning English from the time they enter primary school to their graduation from high school at the age of 16, a recent report found.

In India, meanwhile, there are fears that a massive young population — about a third of the country is under 18 years of age — may prove a crippling burden sufficient to derail the county’s economic renaissance if huge numbers are forced to work in unskilled menial jobs for a lack of education.

A World Bank report published in 2004 found that as much as 25 per cent of Indian teachers are absent at any one time — a statistic that helps explain why about a third of India’s 1.2 billion people cannot read or write, compared with just 9 per cent in China, experts say.

The Indian Finance Ministry recently said that if the country fails to educate its young they will become a growth-sapping “demographic nightmare”.

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