Africa Online School

Martin is Ugandan MBA educated social-impact entrepreneur and Medical Technologist. He is the co-founder and the Director of Programs at Youth Rising International, an organization spearheading Africa Online School, and he has also co-founded several youth-serving startups including The Calabash Collection, Akalimu.com, and All-Star Mentoring Academy. Martin grew up in Uganda, in a humble rural community of Mpumu-Salaama, Mukono District (where Youth Rising Mukono is located), and his childhood struggles built a sense of passion to the service of others.

He is a 2014 Mandela Washington Fellow, a 2016 Tony Elumelu Entrepreneur, a 2018 graduate of Global MBA in Impact Entrepreneurship, a joint university program of Uganda Martyrs University and Catholic University of Milan, Italy. And a 2019 Sanford Institute of Philanthropy Fundraising Class. He is currently a Medical Technologist practicing at Kingman Regional Medical Center, Arizona, USA. 

According to UNICEF, There are over 72 million children in Africa that are not attending school today! And while over 60 million children are in school, they grapple with insufficient learning materials, high student to teacher ratio, and lack of access to information. Internet access also remains a challenge  as 2011 estimates show only 13.5% of the population has access to internet.

In order to create a better and scalable learning environment, there is need to incorporate digital technology and improve access on the continent. Africa Online School is a learning destination of all courses, subjects created by African teachers, to provide learners with educational resources.

We close on the education gap, and elevate education opportunities for children that have been left behind through creating and providing access to curriculum content that directly contribute to their national assessment through offline and online environments partnering with schools and non-profit learning centers.

According to UNESCO, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of education exclusion. Over one-fifth of children between the ages of about 6 and 11 are out of school, followed by one-third of youth between the ages of about 12 and 14. According to UIS data, almost 60% of youth between the ages of about 15 and 17 are not in school. 

This article summarizes the disparities in education on the continent, and I would like to reaffirm where the authors go on and say that even though Africa has registered high enrollments in lower education (almost 80%), this is not translating into high quality education, since systems and resources had not been developed to manage such numbers. The teachers do not receive high quality training, and they don't have access to teaching resources that they could use to facilitate learning. 

Low secondary and tertiary enrollment is a vast challenge. Only four out of every 100 children in Africa are expected to enter a graduate and postgraduate institution. This is majorly due to limited household incomes, which limit children’s access to education. Therefore, the need to build resources and create access to such learning materials cannot be over emphasized.

Africa Online School is a premier destination for all online and offline learning on the African continent. We are building an online environment that allows African teachers to create content and store it on our online database in form of courses. And then we give access to learners across the continent to use this content for their education. 

The second tier is to take the database and install it in computer labs in schools across the continent, so that students can access these tools at their schools just like an offline encyclopedia works. 

The third tier is to partner with nonprofit organizations that focus on education, to create learning hubs where children not in school can access learning materials. 

The final tier is getting accreditation for curriculum from relevant ministries of education to ensure that children learning through this platform can actually sit for national examinations and obtain the national certificate,diploma or degree. 

So in simple terms, Africa Online School brings the African teacher to the African student at the comfort of their smartphone, tablet, computer whether in school or not, home, local community center, online and offline. 

Africa Online School launched in Uganda, and will certainly scale across sub-Saharan Africa. Our community includes children, teachers and schools, who are in dire need of learning resources. At the onset of building this database, we engaged several teachers and collected their ideas on the feasibility of the project. 

We have built teacher collaboration teams to improve the quality of resources we are uploading online, and our teachers have test all curriculum with their students before it is uploaded. Teachers developing the courses have right of ownership to the materials with their co-instructors, and are engaged to improve and update such content from time to time. 

Teachers are finding Africa Online School a great resource in their teaching efforts. Although we are only available online currently, they are optimistic that with helping funding partners, we will be able to purchase the tools we need to bring to bring this technology offline, in their classrooms. 

Students that participated in prototyping were excited about the opportunity to access their lecture notes from any device, contact their teachers remotely, and connect with their peers to solve academic issues together through course forums. Overall, the user friendliness of the platform is making learning fun. 

Africa Online School is well-aligned with elevating education opportunities for children across Africa because they are traditionally left behind through so many disparities in access to not just education, but high quality education. 

Although we are not able to reach all children across Africa, we believe that working with African teachers creating this online resource for their students, is one way of creating massive access to education opportunities, for children in and out of school. We see connected communities that are able to utilize these resources and build the next windmill, just like the boy who harnessed the wind. 

When the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) was declared a pandemic, African countries, and world over, started imposing restrictions on the movement of people, and after a few weeks, public spaces, including schools were closed. 

Youth Rising International has a community center program that offers education opportunities for children and youth not in school. So we also had to close our centers and we started asking ourselves how the kids we are sending home could continue their learning process. 

We had several meetings and did a bit of research only to realize that there were no well organized and curriculum relevant content for children to use, in the learning process. In our design thinking, we knew that this challenge was not only affecting us but the entire school system. So we started engaging community members, students, teachers and partner schools. The end result of our design thinking process was to create a database of relevant content hosted both online and offline, that teachers and students could access and study from virtually anywhere.

For the past 5 years, through Youth Rising, I have dedicated myself to creating affordable and accessible learning opportunities for young people, and I am driven to do so because of my personal experience, growing up and attaining education in Uganda. I am now an MBA educated medical technologist, but due to the cost of basic education in Uganda, there was no way I would have made it to college without (i) generous community support (ii) scholarships and (iii) being very lucky. I mention lucky because my 5 siblings and I were raised by a single mom, who earned the little she could by tirelessly working the land. I can't count the number of times I had to be sent home for school dues, or the times I hid and sneaked back into the classroom after I had been suspended from school due to defaulting payments. 

On my college graduation day, I looked at my brothers and sisters, who did not have the same opportunities as I did. They had already dropped out of school without ever attaining a high school diploma. It really hit me that this was a big challenge and I had to do something about it.

I have been in the education development sector for over 5 years through our organization, Youth Rising International. I have worked with children and youth, taught at various levels including being an assistant lecturer at Kampala International University. I have also been part of education sector reforms in Uganda, on alternative education for children not attending school. This experience, coupled my education and knowledge of digital technologies, I have all it takes to build and scale up a program like this. 

I am also well networked having participated in several forums including the Mandela Washington Fellowship, Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Program, and One Young World. These networks have thousands of young African leaders from virtually all walks of life, and I am tapping into these networks to build connections and launch the program in other African countries. I am already in talks with fellow leaders in Rwanda, Kenya, Sudan and Ghana and Tanzania. 

Our team also has a good relationship with Uganda's Ministry of Education and sports, and we are already in talks to have them accredit and endorse the curricula and education resources that we have uploaded for Uganda.

When we decided to create the , we wanted to do it fast but also make it efficient and robust in serving users. We encountered issues with the company we had hired to develop the website. They never met  deadlines and despite our interventions to support them through the process, we were not getting what we had paid for and the project was stalling. I decided to have a discussion with them and closed the project, securing 80% of our money back.

We didn't have more resources to hire another company, and so I called my high school friends with an IT background. I was able to get 2 of them to voluntarily commit to working with us to build the project from scratch. They have not only done a better job writing the website, but they have even gone on to train teachers on how to use it. 

I am proud of myself that I was able to detect the challenge, clearly navigate it to save some of our money. And I also remained steadfast on our mission, and looked for resourceful people in my network who have done a fantastic job on the website. 

For over five years now, I have been the Director of Programs at Youth Rising International, where I have managed a team of over 20 staff in building programs, implementing initiatives, monitoring and evaluation of impact, among other things. I have mentored, coached and seen transformation of our staff from young university graduates becoming managers within our organization to helping our staff get opportunities for further education and scholarships. Through my work I have seen our organization grow and impact hundreds of young people.

One of our successful beneficiaries is called Richard (the young man in a homepage picture wearing a black t shirt in a digital literacy class at Youth Rising). He came to Youth Rising when he had just completed his high school education. He really wanted to go to College but his parents couldn't afford it. So he enrolled in my digital literacy class that I was teaching at the time. I found him very interested in learning that I started mentoring him. He went on to become a digital literacy facilitator for Youth Rising when he graduated. This year, we are fulfilling his dream by funding for his associate degree in business computing.