Caretrust Foundation - Expanding reach & access to education

Expanding reach and access to education, especially for women and girls.

It is a fact that delivering quality education using the traditional pathway is expensive. That is where online education can step in and bring education to the masses at an affordable price. Online education uses resources efficiently because it does not require physical buildings and administrative fees. Therefore this cuts down significantly on the cost of delivering quality education. This is crucial to Africa and other developing countries for saving time and the financial burden of building traditional brick and mortar schools.

But for the successful implementation of online education, internet access and online learning platforms are necessary. Online education platforms, such as Coursera which were actually developed at MIT in its Open Courseware Project (OCP) depend on Internet/computer access which is a necessary tool for the proper success of e-learning. However, not all the necessary parameters for the establishment of e-learning systems especially internet access, exist in Africa and other developing countries. Access to higher education will be made significantly easier for more citizens of these countries if this problem is resolved. The Caretrust Foundation for Sustainable Development is fully committed to solving this problem and to do our part in the realization of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 4.7. So that we can ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Because education is a fundamental human right and is indispensable for the achievement of sustainable development.

In 2016, we started our Non-Governmental Organization because in Zambia about 2000 students drop out of school yearly, most of whom are women due to pregnancies, early marriages or local traditions and culture that  discourages girls to pursue academic education and focus on getting married and raising a family. To rectify this situation, my NGO works to sponsor, mentor and support the brightest and most brilliant of these girls to re-enrol and complete their high school education. 

To meet our targets we have partnered with some local and international NGO’s in the area such as the Clinton Global Initiative(CGI), the Mastercard Foundation, the YALI Network and other organizations. We expect to assist at least 50 percent of these young women and girls by the year 2020. Is it an ambitious plan? Yes, but a boy can dream. 

To help more women and girls beyond high school, we are currently exploring and researching the efficacy of building a distance and online education platform tailored to African settings as a way of reaching and allowing as many people as possible especially women to access quality education. So currently, we are in the process of building a platform that works both online and offline to carter African communities and universities. In this fate, I will be speaking to a group of African university deans and distinguished university presidents and deans at this years DII conference, to explore how we could partner and provide African university focused online and distance learning to reach out to more students around the Sub-Saharan region.

Our solution is one of a kind because it utilizes technology to deliver online education, offline to areas where the internet accessibility may be erratic or unavailable. Because the digitalization of different sectors of society such as banking, business and education is being driven by the rapid spread of computer technology and Internet access around the world and this is true for Africa as well as other developing countries. Solving most of modern societies problems would require a lot of digitalization and creation of web and mobile platforms to deliver education and technology that can function both online and offline.

The rise of recent social movements like #FeesMust fall in countries like South Africa shows that there is dire need to expand the reach and access to education in developing countries around the world and we believe that online education is the key. Online education is driven by digitalization and technology. Although ‘distance learning’ has been a feature of higher education since the 1960s, the path of online education is expanding to more and more parts of the world and its time it came to Africa and technology will be the driving force behind it. 

Six months from now, I see my organization helping more girls because we have petitioned the government and the minister of education to give us discounts or incentives for the school fees of our members with proven academic prowess. that way we could help more women. We will also be polishing up e-drum, our offline education platform. in fact, I will be speaking to university deans at the DII conference to hopefully create a stronger partnership. So that after a year, we can put together and launch a pilot of our online/offline education platform. 

Three to five years from now we should have a working distance online/offline education platform for local universities and colleges to enroll more students. We also hope to have working and functional virtual and remote laboratories incorporated into our online education platform for people, especially in rural areas without access to laboratory materials and equipment. We also hope to be in the expansion stage and to have growing online education dominance and a presence in more African countries. This will be discussed at this years DII conference so that we can partner with various African Universities.

We mostly operate and work with women and girls in more rural parts of the country. Despite that, we enjoy working with people from urban areas though our main focus are rural areas. We also recruit new members into our program from secondary schools that we support in our secondary school scholarship program and these together with college students, professionals and other school leavers who are interested in our program would be recruited through our university partnerships with local colleges and universities.

In recognition of our efforts to improve our community, we have been visited twice by her honour, Mrs. Kampamba Mulenga, Zambia's minister of community development and social services to offer her support and mentorship. With the support of our government, the public and well-wishers our organization has made a lot of positive impacts. In late 2016 we only had about 5 young mothers and Last year we had about 50 women. We hope to have at least 100 women by the end of 2018 and by 2020 our goal is to help 1000 mothers. 

We have set various milestones to track our progress. The most immediate and important one at the moment is to complete our platform and have it ready within the next 12 months. To help more people, especially women and girls we plan to fully launch and have a functional platform in at least three years. We keep careful records of our members and we define our success as the number of people that re-enrol and manage to successfully complete their education and proceed to college. As well as the number of subscribers and students that are successfully using our platform.

We conducted extensive academic research on the topic in question with the support of EESCA. Additionally, my team has received support from the Clinton Global Initiative(CGI), the Mastercard Foundation and we also got invited to attend Open Con which is the annual open and online learning conference, being held in Toronto, Canada. No wonder we share very unique and diverse perspectives about our project. I will also be presenting at the Clinton Global Initiative in Chicago on this topic, President Clinton and other high profiles will be attending so I will also bring that experience to the conference if selected.

We receive sponsorships occasionally mostly from well-wishers such as corporations and companies for which we are very grateful as these funds go a long way toward helping our women. in exchange, we help promote their brands.

As part of my job in the organization, I conduct research and applications for various grants available to help out with financing our cause, hence that is why I will be attending the Clinton Global Initiative.

We are also reforming our organization to include more sustainability as part of our portfolio. That way may be able to advance more SDG's and secure additional grants and funding while we try to address more problems at the same time. 

We also receive donations from our supporters and other high profile government officials interested in our cause. Sometimes the gifts are small, large or in between. Sometimes they are not monetary. For example, the minister of Community development was so impressed with our work she rewarded us by giving us new office space to work from.

But the majority of our funds are from our SAT college program. We charge a small fee for high school students interested in taking SATS to receive our Kaplan Certified tutorage.

The transition from traditional distance education to the modern era of online education was greatly inspired by the success and sustainability of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare project. MIT eventually launched Edx, a US-based non-profit organization founded by both MIT and Harvard University to deliver online content. 

We are applying to Solve because if successful, we could possibly have the expertise of professionals that helped develop the Edx platform at MIT, they would be invaluable in helping develop our own platform called 'e-drum' which will be able to work both online and offline to provide e-learning courses.

Even though our e-learning program is somewhat already in the implementation stage, we face numerous challenges and would relish the opportunity to partner with Solve and learn critical skills such as Organizational monitoring skills, strategic funding and fundraising among other skills. 

One of the other major challenges we face is regarding STEM education. STEM education requires a foundation of proficiency in conceptual understanding, as well as proficiency in design, problem-solving and practical and laboratory education. To solve this problem, we plan on developing virtual and remote laboratories but we lack the expertise for this.