Beyond the Classroom

A widening gap between the economic needs and education outcomes continues to pose a major challenge to the Africa development goals. Notable efforts to counter this challenge include offering free education to children and re-designing the school curriculum. These efforts have succeeded to improve school enrollment, but have overstretched school resources that have remained constant. The small successes achieved by these efforts have been further challenged by the Covid-19 Pandemic and the suspension of schooling in many learning institutions, calling for innovation beyond the classroom to deliver quality education at the grassroots level. Our solution is an integrated edtech program designed to improve learning interaction between learners, parents, teachers, and learning content that is delivering quality education to the most remote parts of East Africa in the middle of a pandemic. If scaled globally the program will ensure accelerated learning and equal access to quality education regardless of the location.

Rural districts in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda face many challenges in providing quality education. Although education is now free and school enrollment has increased, the number of resources provided to schools has remained constant-- leading resources to be now more overstretched than ever. Lack of materials and tools in classrooms impede teachers and inhibit student learning.  In 2017, only 16% of Tanzanians had access to the internet, 24% in Uganda, and 18% in Kenya. These statistics are exacerbated in rural areas, limiting students' options for digital learning. In addition, the current curriculum and classroom pedagogy in East Africa do not correspond with the social and workforce expectations of the 21st century. Students lack digital literacy training, problem-solving, communication, and critical thinking skills needed for succeeding beyond the classroom. Low-resourced areas lead to low pass rates and low transition rates from primary to secondary school. In Tanzania, 70% of children aged 14-17 do not go to school, while only 3.2% are enrolled for the last two years of High School. If girls are not in school, they are five times more likely to have begun childbearing, which also often leads to early marriage and gender based violence.

Through its Beyond the classroom initiative, Asante Africa provides a three pronged approach to deliver quality education to rural areas: 

1. Building an ICT Infrastructure to access learning within and beyond the classroom- We provide a Hybrid(Offline-Online) learning management system that runs on low cost servers and user devices. Equipped with low power tablets and a power bank the learners download their teacher's lessons from an offline school server that functions as a community hub, allowing them to take the lessons with them and learn remotely. Our technical officers in the field collect data from all the school facilities and upload it to an online portal on weekly basis. This “human” part of the system makes it possible for deployment on areas without access to the internet.

2. Capacity Building- We train teachers, learners, parents and the local community to use, maintain and make data driven educational decisions from data provided by the system. The teachers are then able to identify student weaknesses and provide individualized tuition.

3. Giving Access to quality content- In addition to the National curriculum, Asante Africa also provides access to digital Life Skills, Leadership and Entrepreneurship Courses as digital content in the hybrid learning management systems.

Our solution serves upper primary and secondary school students, youth aged 9-18. In 2021 we are working directly with 8,500 students and indirectly with almost 42,000 students in 147 schools throughout East Africa. Since Asante Africa’s inception in 2011, we have impacted 154,000 students in 330 schools with our Beyond the Classroom program and 594,000 youth organization wide. 100% of the schools we work in have zero digital resources and technologies before our intervention. We purposefully work in ‘off the paved road’, ‘last mile’ communities that NGOs do not normally reach due to distance and cost. 

Before we select a school to work in, we hold several stakeholder meetings to ensure we understand the community and develop an MOU with the school and district government. In every district we have two annual stakeholder meetings which bring together the District Executive Officers, Government officials, Heads of school, parents and elders to ensure we hear all perspectives. We prioritize expanding to new schools within existing districts so that schools with our programming may serve as mentors to new schools, ensuring sustainability and support throughout the year. In every new region we enter, we have a regional coordinator native to that region who understands the local context and complexities. Our regional coordinators are essential in shaping our programming to be specific to the needs of each region and community. Lastly, our program is customizable. We work with each head of school to address their specific needs. Our curriculum comes in modules so that students have freedom of choice in what they want to learn and in what order. Our programming in Kenya is very different to our programming in Tanzania to reflect the specific challenges of different environments. 

Students in Asante Africa programs have demonstrated an increase in analytical and critical thinking skills, show increased success in their academic performance, a decrease in pregnancy dropout and an increase in transition to higher learning. In addition to increasing digital inclusion, our program has boosted our students’ confidence to ask and answer questions in classrooms, think more critically, improve reasoning and better solve problems, academically and beyond. We believe that our solution is perfect for rural and remote areas particularly in sub-saharan Africa. 

Asante Africa is not only ensuring that students in low-connectivity, remote communities have the same access to learning as those in urban settings, but also working to increase the engagement of learners and ensure they transition from primary to secondary school. In the upper primary level we pay specific attention to our female students who often dropout of school or do not transition to secondary school due to early pregnancy or marriage. We work specifically with the parents, teachers and government officials to provide them with exposure and create cultural change that champions’ girls right to education.

We have been perfecting our solution since 2011. In 2021 we are in 147 communities: in Tanzania 50 secondary schools and 15 primary schools throughout 11 regions, in Kenya 20 secondary schools and 22 primary schools throughout 8 counties, and in Uganda 8 secondary schools and 8 primary schools throughout 2 counties. The Lushoto district in Tanzania can showcase our success. We are currently in 18 secondary schools in Lushoto and the government has requested our programs in all secondary schools due to the success of the program. In schools with Asante Africa in the Lushoto district, they have seen an increase in academic performance, a decrease in truancy, an increase in the transition from primary to secondary schools and a decrease in dropout due to early pregnancy. We plan to continue to grow our solution to new counties and to Rwanda over the next five years.  

At Asante Africa, we are using existing technologies and applying them in an innovative way to holistically improve the quality of education in rural East Africa. We provide schools with digital tools and our age appropriate life skills curriculums. 

Although we support the learning of the national curriculum through providing digital tools for remote learning, we also supply learners with our curriculum for 21st century life skills. Our curriculum’s success lies on it’s innovative Learn-Do-Teach methodology and girl-led programming. 

Asante Africa’s Learn-Do-Teach which was recognized as a 2019 Top Ten Drucker Prize Finalist for Innovation in Education. In three phases youth learn through curriculum taught by older youth in the program, do by practicing through hands-on practice and income-generating activities and teach, or Pay-it-Forward to younger students through mentorship and teaching program curriculum. Research shows the Learn-Do-Teach methodology increases retention to 90% compared to 30% for traditional learning alone. Pay-it-Forward puts skills into practice, instills confidence, and starts young people on the path to become active community leaders. 

Girl-led programming allows girls to take action in reinventing their futures by placing them at the center of program design and implementation. In youth-governed clubs, girls are the officers in the first year and taught how to lead groups sustainably. Girls create personalized roadmaps for success and together select modules for learning most relevant to them. We continue to learn based on successes and incorporate our results into our programming to ensure the most cost-effective and impactful results.

In 2021 we are working directly with 8,500 students and indirectly with almost 42,000 students in 147 schools throughout East Africa. 

Since Asante Africa’s inception in 2011 we have directly impacted 154,000 students and over 700,000 collectively in 330 schools/communities through beyond the classroom; our program is continuously evolving to include new technologies and practices. 

Over the next five years we have ambitious goals to continue to expand our program and reach more students.  Our plan is to impact 1.6 million lives in an additional 2,200 schools by 2025. 65% of this growth will be in the countries and counties in which we already work. 35% will be in new countries and counties which we plan to strategically expand into in the next five years. 

We choose areas for expansion based on high levels of need and rural location. We identify need by a high rate of child marriage and gender-based violence, a low age of first sex and age of marriage, a low transition rate for girls from primary to secondary, a low secondary school retention rates and/or high drop-out rate for girls, a high population density (impact per dollar spent) with fewer interventions (high priority), and alignment with National and local government vision.  We will expand into Rwanda, four new counties in Kenya, five new regions in Tanzania and one new county in Uganda. The remaining expansion will be in our existing program counties to allow for meaningful and deep impact of our programming throughout the area. 

Over the past three years we have seen the following results of our program youth: 93% transitioned to high school, 77% qualified for college, 55% showed academic grade improvement, 67% were actively goal setting, 75% boys accepting girls as leaders, 61% increase in confidence to lead, 142 businesses initiated during COVID-19, 35% increase in financial self-reliance, 49 Pay-it-Forward initiatives annually and 86% actively engaged in their communities. 

 Over the next five years we will measure success based on the following indicators: 

1) Achieve Greater Academic Success 

Attendance: (~ 3x increase)

Transition Success: 80% from primary to  secondary; 95% to post-secondary

Digital Literacy: 70% of youth have improved skills 

2) Build Critical Health & Life Skills

Financial:  80% adolescents w/ skills & personal savings plan

Health: 80% demonstrate knowledge of health & hygiene practices; 80% reduction in early pregnancies/STI’s/ GBV

3) Have Better Quality of Life & Livelihoods

Personal Development: 80% report confident to lead; 80% of boys as active allies for girls 

Jobs: 60% alumnae have “decent” work of choice

Businesses: 55% have created a business / 20% technology-based

Reduced Poverty: 30% reduction in household poverty b/c of youth contribution 

4) Active Local And Global Citizenship - Pay-it-Forward

80% alumnae  involved in communities

600,000 lives impacted through PIF

5) Sustainability  & Growth 

Parental Support  

75% of  girls report active parental involvement

Schools, Communities & Business Support Programs

95% clubs active for 3 years post Asante Africa 

90% youth spearhead advocacy at community level 

40% youth business plans receive financing

At Asante Africa we have 33 full time employees: 1 CEO (USA), 3 Country Directors (Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda), 1 Global M&E Director (Kenya), 23 Program Staff (all), 3 Accountants (1 Kenya, 1 Tanzania, 1 Uganda), 1 Global Finance Director (Kenya) and 1 Education Digital Transformation Manager (Kenya). 

Asante Africa Foundation began as a scholarship provider to rural youth in 2007. We observed girls dropping out of primary school because of early marriage, cultural norms, or child labor. Many had a lack of health knowledge, life skills, and self-confidence to continue education. We began to seek a solution to this complex problem. 

This led to our adolescent program, Wezesha Vijana (“Empowering Ourselves” in Swahili).  Young teens began to advocate for skills to stand up to abuse, represent their own interests, and engage their parents in their education.  They wanted tools to help them design opportunities and tackle hardships that lay beyond high school. 

These needs led to the development of age-appropriate life skills, leadership, and entrepreneurship hands-on activities for primary and secondary school youth. Participants include the youth, educators, and the community members.

During the pandemic we transitioned our group learning model from a school setting to a community setting while maintaining the safe space. Through leveraging local business people and health experts and incorporating digital content, we were able to continue providing rural East African youth with quality education. 

Our team is particularly suited to implement this solution. Some of our staff have quite literally grown up alongside the organization. We are lucky to have many alumni as staff, putting them in the prime position to implement the programs as they deeply understand the challenges and context in which we are working because they have experienced the same.  

At Asante Africa we have a policy that “If it's about us, it can’t be without us”. We go beyond youth participation to youth leading the change, identifying the problems, innovating and implementing the solutions with our support-- believing and practicing that if we create solutions for youth, youth need to be involved in their design. We value local understanding and local expertise. Our board and staff represent those we serve and are inclusive of women and youth. All of our in-country staff originate from the country and communities in which they work. 

Additionally, one of our three main organizational goals based on our 5 year strategic plan is to ensure a transition to an East Africa-led team. We are 80% of the way to reaching this target and have a dedicated action plan to make this number real. Here are some of the steps we have taken thus far. In 2019, we successfully transitioned the Global Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Director role to East Africa and in 2020, even in the midst of the pandemic, successfully transitioned the Finance and Administration Controller position to East Africa (which had previously been based in Canada.) By 2025, we will have completed the CEO leadership from the co-founder, who is US-based, to an East-African CEO. Our 5 year strategic plan can be viewed here: https://asanteafrica.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Summary-2025StrategicPlan-AsanteAfrica.pdf

At Asante Africa, we are applying to Solve because we seek to scale up to 2,200 new communities and reach 1.6 million lives throughout East Africa by 2025. We believe that our Beyond the Classroom has seen many successes in increasing the quality of education for students in remote areas of sub-saharan Africa and is ready to be scaled up to new regions and countries, creating new leaders and change makers throughout the region. 

 We know that in order to achieve this goal we need support to build an advanced marketing, fundraising and monitoring and evaluation team. MIT Solve has an expansive network of  cross-sector leaders with experience in international development, philanthropy, media, advocacy and finance. This network could unlock many doors for Asante Africa and help identify leaders to serve on its board and promote its mission of quality education despite location. 

Currently we have 33 staff throughout four countries (USA, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania). In order to meet our goals we need to expand our staff and hire new regional coordinators for the regions and counties we will expand into. In order to do this we need more funding. We believe that the Solvers on MIT’s team can help us to create a revenue generating model and seek partnerships to have a robust external evaluation. We believe these are two crucial pieces of the puzzle to reaching our 4 million annual revenue goal by 2025. 

Asante Africa is seeking support and mentorship in three areas: funding, monitoring and evaluation, and public relations. At Asante Africa, we know that in order to be financially stable long-term we need to have a source of revenue generating, separate from grants and donations. We also know that we have a program and curriculum that is being recognized as effective and low-cost and organizations are willing to pay for it. We have the opportunity and would like to make it real.

In order for that to happen we need certification from our respective program country governments and recognition from the education community. In order to get these recognitions and certification, robust impact results are required and evidence that our solution works. We need to amplify our monitoring and evaluation strategies and collaborate with partners to execute external evaluations. Although we have already completed several external evaluations, we need guidance on how to make our impact monitoring stronger and relay this information to funders. 

Lastly, support around public relations would be helpful to Asante Africa. We need support to build out our brand globally and attract cross-sector leaders with experience in international development, philanthropy, media, advocacy and finance to serve on its board and promote its mission of quality education despite location.

Asante Africa aims to continue to expand on its strategic partnership to reach the 2025 strategic plan. Potential partners include Middle East funding organizations focused on Africa’s development. Dubai Cares shares our primary focus on UN SDG 4, ensuring inclusive and quality education for all. Like Dubai Cares, we focus on access to quality primary and secondary education including transitions to secondary. 

 Funding organizations with a focus on Research and Learning provide important evidence demonstrating effectiveness and impact. A partnership with MIT’s J-PAL would help establish results and concrete evidence that our programming works, allowing us to attract more funders and investors. 

Our geographic location limits our ability to capture the attention of UK-based organizations. As a leader in global women’s empowerment, DFID’s Vision for Gender Equality to create opportunities for girls and women to enjoy their rights is highly aligned with our Wezesha Vijana program. Partnership with DFID would validate our adolescent, girl-centered programming, transitions, and girl-led secondary-level programming within the global stakeholder network and create awareness to fuel program support. 

Asante Africa Foundation also seeks to partner with implementing organizations through membership in coalitions dedicated to educating children globally, youth employment, and combating gender inequities and injustices that limit girls’ potential. We are currently active in Obama Foundation’s Girls Opportunity Alliance, Girls Not Brides, the World Bank Solutions 4 Youth Employment (S4YE) and Brookings Institution’s Girls CHARGE (Collaborative for Harnessing Ambition and Resources for Girls’ Education).

Asante Africa’s Beyond the Classroom is working hard to provide quality education to learners despite the schooling setbacks of COVID-19. The main goal of our Beyond the Classroom program is to ensure access to the national curriculum for learners remotely, including STEM subjects. We offer our program schools an ICT Infrastructure to access learning within and beyond the classroom by providing a Hybrid (Offline-Online) learning management system that runs on low cost servers and user devices. Equipped with low power tablets and a power bank the learners download their teacher's planned lessons from an offline school server that functions as a community hub. They can either use this content in school or at home during their prep-time. Once they come to school they then sync their data to the school facility where teachers use this data to design more focused lessons for the learners. Our technical officers in the field collect data from all the school facilities and upload it to an online portal on weekly bases. This “human” part of the system makes it possible for deployment on areas without access to the internet. Our learning management system allows teachers to make informed decisions on areas of student weakness and to develop individualized tuition plans for students who are falling behind thereby creating a learner-centered environment and allowing for improved student academic performance. 

70% of Asante Africa’s ‘Beyond the Classroom’ program focuses on keeping girls engaged in the learning process and transitioning from primary to secondary school. Since we see many girls dropout in the last years of primary school or not transition to secondary school due to early marriage and pregnancy, we begin our intervention early. Asante Africa collaborates with parents, local leaders, and organizations, to develop a community-based program, specific to East Africa that reaches out to adolescent girls, their mothers, and male peers to educate them on their rights, reproductive health, financial literacy, and personal safety, filling crucial knowledge gaps in the national curriculum. We teach girls in our program to be leaders and their own champions by creating safe spaces in schools for girls to speak their minds and advocate for themselves. Success is evidenced by our multi-year evaluation conducted across KE & TZ:: 

• 80% 4-7 grade school attendance increased w/ 20% academic improvement

• 82% grade 7 girls secured secondary school placement (natl avg 42%)

• 90% dropout decrease due to pregnancy over 3 yrs, 70% schools

• 200+ innovation/enterprise clubs created over 3 yrs

• 150% stronger SRH/GRV rights knowledge than control group

• Improved male attitudes and behaviors related to gender-based violence

We deliver our content through our Learning Management System, so that in addition to gaining financial skills including saving and budgeting, reproductive health knowledge and leadership skills for self-confidence and self-awareness they are also receiving the digital skills they need to be successful beyond the classroom. 

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