Global Future Academy (GFA)

In the era of Globalization, Bangladesh's economy is growing at the fastest pace. However, its Human Resources is not advancing in similar pace. The school going children, who will enter the labor force within a few years, are especially falling behind as they are not being provided with the best quality education & training. 

The situation is even worse in the private kindergarten schools (K-5) where they receive little or no government assistance.   

Gloabl Future Academy (GFA) aims set up at least One Digital Classroom in each of the over 100,000 privately-run kindergarten schools across Bangladesh to provide the students with access to latest audio-visual learning materials, with a special focus on teaching English as a Second Language. 

These Digital Classrooms will introduce the young learners with world-class contents and prepare them as a global citizen allowing them competitive edge in the global job market.

In Bangladesh, there are over one hundred thousand privately run Kindergarten schools besides the similar number of government primary schools. There are tens of millions of young learners are attending these schools to prepare themselves for their future. 

However, teaching quality in these schools are very poor due to lack of skilled teachers.These schools are self funded and depend financially on the tuition fees paid by the students. Teachers are paid an average salary of less than 3000 BDT or 40 USD a month. Most of the teachers are part timers and they are often college students themselves with no proper training to teach. 

The poor quality in teaching leads to poor learning experience and the huge number of primary school graduates face difficulty in later stage of learning and often enter the labor force with little knowledge or skills to contribute.  Bangladesh's second highest economic contributor is the remittance sent by the expatriates abroad. Remittance from expatriate earnings as well as from the growing ICT & Outsourcing sector could be increased manifold had the country developed skilled manpower with good knowledge in English as a second language. 

The government of Bangladesh is trying hard to digitize the learning experience at the government-run primary school but the over one hundred thousand privately-run kindergarten schools do not have access to any government funding or resources other than the text books. Almost ninety-nine percent of these schools have no digital class rooms and most of these schools can not afford to hire properly trained and skilled teachers. 

In order to improve the quality of teaching, especially in the areas of  English as a second language and audio-visual learning, Global Future Academy (GFA) will be setting up a digital classroom in each of the private kindergarten schools across the country to enhance the learning experience of the students. 

Students from each class will have an opportunity to attend two/three Digital Classes a week by rotation in addition to their regular classes. These classes will be conducted with the help of technology by a trained teacher. 

GFA will be training at least 3 teachers of the individual school so that they can effectively deliver the contents developed and provided by GFA. 

What sort of a society Bangladesh will have in the next decades depends on what sort of education we provide to our children. Tens of millions of children and parents alike are now frustrated over the quality of education they are getting out of the schools and quality education providers are rare finds in Bangladesh these days.

To sustain the economic prosperity Bangladesh is achieving, the quality of education in the country must improve and the improvement must start from the basic primary level. This is a huge challenge and there is no sign of overcoming this challenge in the near future as the government initiatives would take at least over a decade, if not more, just to reach out to all the govt-run schools, let alone the private schools. 

GFA has come up with an innovative and cost effective solution to this problem. We will set up at least one Digital Classroom to deliver world class K-5 education contents through multimedia equipment. Our innovative Digital Classroom concept contains a TV that will also turn into a computer, mainly to display educational videos, English language lessons in power point, fun and interesting educational contents to students. A white board as better teaching tool for the teacher and a well planned curriculum in English to improve the English Language learning among the students, which will ultimately help them with greater access to further learning as well as give them competitive edge in the global context. The main objective of GFA will be developing world class education contents online and deliver them offline to rural students across Bangladesh. 

GFA will be centrally headquartered in Dhaka in order to develop, distribute and monitor the implementation of the project throughout the country. We have already run this program in 5 different schools as a pilot project and now we will formally launch 500 Digital Classrooms in 500 schools across 500 upazilas of Bangladesh. GFA will be funding these classrooms, each of which would cost about 1200 US Dollars. The schools will be paying this investment back in two years, only 60 USD/month (5000 BDT) in 24 equal installments, which would be an easy and affordable term for the schools. 

After successful operation in the 500 schools, GFA will work over the next 5 years until 2025 to install such classrooms in at least 100,000 schools across the country. 

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I am dedicated to improved the quality of education in Bangladesh so that Bangladesh has a better society in the future like it used to have. 

Tiger IT could become a partner in this social venture which is also financially sustainable. 

IFC, UNICEF