Maxim Nyansa IT Solutions Foundation

We are an NGO with the mission to create career opportunities for African youth with information technology. Since we have successfully introduced various programs to introduce 21st century skills programs to schools and vocational programs in ICT for young graduates in Ghana, people from all over the ECOWAS region are calling us to join our organization. With more than 100 million young people in this part of the world who need quality education and jobs, "no" is not an option for us. 

We badly want to win the Elevate Prize and use it for the following:

1. the establishment of model schools to showcase our learning transformation programs for African schools in all countries where we have started to work, in collaboration with local Teacher colleges. 

2. the growth of our new online digital library with free quality educational content for African school children, teachers and IT professionals

3. the establishment of 4 new training centers for young graduates from an underprivileged background. Currently almost all our trainees from Maxim Nyansa programs are in quality ICT jobs or have started their own IT companies.  

In 2011, I decided to quit my job at Vodafone Ghana to work as a school teacher in the field of science and IT. In the four years in an ordinary junior high school in Accra, I developed a holy discontent with the way the educational system in West-Africa is organized, preventing young people from early childhood until university to really own what they learn, and be able to apply it. In 2015, together with a Dutch co-founder, I started the Maxim Nyansa foundation with the ambitious mission to make a change in the education of millions of young people by developing educational programs to prepare them for the job market of the 21st century. We decided to learn from a lot of fail and success factors of similar projects in Africa, and started to pilot in 2016 with programs for both school children and young graduates in IT. The results were great from the beginning and since then we have been executing numerous  "learning transformation projects" in schools all over Ghana, improving the learning experience of thousands of students. In our training center, we do bootcamps for young IT-graduates from underprivileged backgrounds and get them into quality jobs.

West-Africa is a region with more than 200 million young people under the age of 25. Most of them go to school but the quality of the educational system does not prepare them properly for the job market. As a result, we see a lot of youth unemployment, about 50% of the youth do not find a job after graduaton, many do not have the right skills or resources to obtain a vocational education. Our foundation has the mission to create career perspective for young Africans with information technology. We have designed an integrated "learning transformation program" where we equip schools with teacher training, computers and smartboards, and free educational content. We also have vocational training programs in ICT to prepare young people for a job in this industry, which is growing with 40% annually and is in high demand of good professionals. All our programs are highly practical and interactive and also engage softs skills such as time management, project management and communication. Because we work with donated hardware, open source training materials and a lot of volunteers, we can do a lot with limited resources. Our approach is easily scalable, and we have an online digital library. 

Our approach is based on extensive research of success factors of ICT projects in African schools as well as 21st century skills learning innovations in Europe. The result: evidence based, integrated programs for youth in various age groups. These are always very practical and interactive. Young people get the opportunity to work on their own projects, on their own computers, so they really understand what they learn, instead of the classic teacher oriented approach that is the norm in most African schools. We share quality open source educational content via our online digital library or a local server. We work with hardware donations from European businesses and organizations who give us their slightly used computers for a 2nd life in an African school. Our staff is specialized in both IT and Education and invests a lot in the training of teachers in deprived schools. At the same time, most of our work is carried by our large community of passionate volunteers who apply their international professional standards as much to their work with us. This combination of professionalism, an evidence-based, holistic way of working and frugality has proven easily scalable. Maxim Nyansa is now working in 5 different African countries. 

In 2020 we have developed an impact assessment methodology in collaboration with the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to monitor and evaluate our interventions while various studies have also been done to investigate the impact of ICT4Dev /ICT in schools projects on development in Africa. See our website  Research & Reports – Maxim Nyansa IT Solutions  

We see that most of our schools and young IT professionals since 2016 show significant good results (exam scores, % of students able to enroll in further education, % of trainees into quality jobs). Very recently schools in West-Africa have reopened (COVID) and we are now able to to start the implementation of this new impact assessments methodology systematically.

The needs are huge - so we need to grow in size and impact. We have designed and automated our organization in such a way that it can easily be copied as a franchise model in other African countries with the same educational system, which we have recently started to materialize with branches in Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and The Gambia, while our support foundation in The Netherlands is multiplying in the same way, with "copies" in Belgium and recently in the USA.