iAfrica Cloud School

• The major social problem that iAfrica Cloud School addresses are illiteracy among children in underserved communities in Africa, starting with our beachhead, Nigeria. A problem that has greatly impoverished the nation. Public schools in Nigeria have been poorly funded according to the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) which recommends allocating between 16 and 25% of a country's budget to education. Nigeria's government appropriations to education rarely exceeds 6% in a time when other countries are building for a technological and innovative generation. Today’s funding remains significantly below the global recommendation. Besides this, the lack of provision of basic social amenities has made many people resort to creating and living in slums where opportunities for quality education and employment are non-existent, thereby further increasing the nation’s poverty index every year.

• Globally, the statistics for the world’s poorest lies at 9.2% (689 million people) with Africa accounting for 40% of this population. In Sub-Saharan Africa, women and children make up the majority of the people living below $1.90 per day (World Bank, 2020).  Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and according to the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics (2020) which shows that 40 percent of Nigerians or 83 million people lived in poverty in 2020.

• Currently, one of every five out-of-school children in the world lives in Nigeria. The future is in technology and innovation and it is critical for the future of our country that qualitative and holistic solutions for the K-12 education sector are deployed as a matter of urgency. Currently, most of Nigeria’s spending on education is in the tertiary education sector and the iAfrica Cloud Schools solution is designed to meet the deficits created by these spending patterns.

•  A major adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns was the massive loss of jobs, particularly for many daily paid workers who earned their living by engaging in some form of petty trading activities. With no real support from the government as a palliative for COVID-19, many Nigerian families hitherto living on the fringe spiraled below the poverty line and had to withdraw their children from schools to manage the challenges. Sadly, many of them,  mostly girls, did not make it back to school as a result of teenage pregnancy which emanated from cases of rape. Although the poverty profile for Nigeria for 2021 has not yet been published, it is expected that the number of poor people in the country would rise to 90 million in 2022, accounting for 45 percent of the population. 

• iAfrica Cloud School is providing a digital end-to-end education solution that provides high-quality 21st-century lessons for K-12 education, with the same level of teacher participation and the use of quality teaching resources used in private nursery and primary schools in Nigeria.

• Our beachhead is the teeming number of children/teenagers (ages 3 – 18 years) living in the underserved communities, those found on the Nigerian streets in urban cities begging for alms and the young female children who have been married off as teenagers due to family financial situations and tradition but still desire to go to school. We also look to cater to internally displaced children (IDPs) resulting from insecurity and natural disasters that create ungoverned/ungovernable spaces. These children live in the IDP Camps created around Nigeria. 

• We use the Microsoft Teams platform to facilitate our hybrid classroom. This enables children in underserved communities, like the Kuchingoro Internally Displaced Peoples (IDP) Camp in Abuja and Makoko fishing community in Lagos, to be taught. Our ‘To Be’ optimal solution is to develop and launch an iAfrica Learning Management System for the entire K- 12. 

• We have established various community cells which comprise 50 pupils and 2 facilitators each raised from within the communities. Compared with the cost of running a physical school, our solution offers a high impact at a minimal cost.

• The iAfrica Cloud School teachers connect online from our headquarters in Lagos during these teaching sessions, while local community facilitators join in to broadcast the lessons and offer on-ground support. These facilitators, also known as iAfrica Cloud School Ambassadors, have received extensive training on how to operate the technical devices (such as laptops, projectors, digital cameras and Bluetooth speakers) used for live streaming and recording sessions. They will also help with the collection of data as the programme advances.

• We are currently in the pilot phase with about 1502 children from underserved communities in Lagos, Abuja and Jos enrolled in the programme, and we hope to reach about 5,000 children in the next one year. We deliver our lessons using both synchronous and asynchronous methods, and we have begun discussions with various community stakeholders as our market penetration strategy evolves.

iAfrica Cloud School targets all the underserved children in Nigeria who lack access to quality basic and foundational education. We launched our project with a special focus on reading, writing and oral communication.  

In Nigeria, underserved communities are divided into two categories: 

a. Creation of temporary refugee camps as a result of displacement caused by both human (insecurity) and natural disasters.

b. Slum communities that lack all of the basic infrastructure and amenities that support quality living and education where the children reside with their families. These usually are found in urban areas. 

• Children in the first group account for 60% of all displaced people, with one in every four being under the age of five.  In the internally displaced persons' camp in Borno State, Nigeria, for example, nearly 17, 000 infants were born in 2019. These children are now five years old, but they are unable to gain any access to basic education. This early denial of education has a negative impact on their cognitive development and this makes it easier for them to be recruited into various groups that terrorize different parts of the country.

• While the children in the second category may appear to live in relative security, they face the same difficulty as the children in the first: they lack access to quality education. By being idle, many have been enticed into gangs that operate internet fraud scams as well as, making them easy recruits for local armed robbery syndicates and drug lords, whilst the young girls are kidnapped and forced into baby factories or prostitution rings resulting in the high numbers of teenage pregnancies recorded in recent times.

•  According to Statista, about 34 million African children are currently out of school. Once we get through our pilot phase we look forward to extending our services beyond Nigeria, first into English speaking African countries and then to the rest of Africa. 

As iAfrica develops, we will continue to provide a learning environment that enhances cognitive development and learning skills that will allow these children to become productive members of society.  Our K-12 curricula will enable them to acquire artisan, technological, and creative art skills that will open up to employment opportunities and entrepreneurship.  

• Our pioneer team comprises 10 key members along with numerous volunteers. Five people work at the Lagos headquarters, and five people represent the five communities we are currently working with. We also have the support of a seven-member Board of Trustees made up of outstanding individuals from Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America who are all motivated by the Foundation's purpose and a desire to create a more equitable Nigerian society. With a vision to give back, Standard Bearers School Alumni have jumped on board this CSR project as they believe in the value of education as a vehicle for change.  

• The team lead has over four decades of experience working with private schools and is the founder and executive director of Standard Bearers School in Lekki, Lagos, Nigeria. In 2019, she mentored and entered a team of five girls in a global technology competition with the goal of impacting students with future-ready skills. She has since gone on to mentor 12 more teams for the Technovation Girls Global Competition. In the 2019 edition of the competition, her pioneer team, BrainSquad, and their  Handsout app made it to the finals. 
• The team lead is supported by a group of renowned educators, finance and business development experts, and a technology support team. 

• iAfrica’s leadership team also includes Nigeria’s country director of Jolly Phonics (a leading literacy method for teaching children reading and writing skills), e-learning curriculum development and pedagogy experts as well as a growing technology support team.

• Having resided in Nigeria all their lives, the iAfrica team have witnessed the downward spiral of the country, especially in the education sector. It was during the pandemic, that the magnitude of the problem was amplified by the sheer number of homeless and hungry children who filled the streets. It was then that the decision to become solution providers kicked in and our foundation was born. As key stakeholders, everyone has direct access to the various areas we serve and has firsthand knowledge of how life is in these communities. All of us are motivated by a desire to assist the children in these communities in shaping and redefining their own futures.

• Demands for iAfrica to come into communities in the Eastern and Northen areas of Nigeria is growing. The foundation is desirous of building her own learning management system which will help her to adequately cater to the increasing demands in the first instance, but also accommodate the wider range of educational offerings for the larger audience which the African continent represents. Our lessons will be delivered in English, French, Portuguese, Swahili and Arabic.

• We are looking to leverage the global reputation of MIT and the technical and people resources at her disposal to develop this learning management system (LMS) that can cater to the needs of not just the underserved children in Nigeria, but across Africa.  We are also interested in other technical assistance and financial resources that Solve may provide to improve our curriculum development and delivery methodologies.

• Businesses were forced to close due to the global pandemic, and everyone was forced to switch to some form of remote learning. There were no exceptions for schools. Many private schools in Nigeria were able to transition to online learning, but many children in Africa remained out of school. 

• In Nigeria today, there are around 61,9211 private and 55,004 public nursery and primary schools but the number of pupils attending both varies greatly. Only 5.4 million of Nigeria's 28 million primary school pupils attend private schools, indicating that the majority of the children attend public schools, many of which lack the facilities and resources needed to develop 21st-century learners.

• In addition, while digital education requires the use of individual tools, our cell structure is a creative means of starting students on their digital journey at a lower cost, allowing us to reach locations where teachers are in short supply.

• The World Economic Forum (WEF) (2019) underlined emphatically the importance of training and upskilling African youth and children in order to prepare them for future employment. This preparation must begin with literacy.

In the next 5 years, we should have launched our LMS platform the first set of our schoolchildren should be preparing to enter our equivalent of middle school.

Currently, we get feedback from our on-ground facilitators. The digital camera provided allows them to record their activities outside of the live stream sessions as well as build some of our data through surveys. We also plan to partner with an NGO that specialises in building social impact data and have also shown interest in our work. 

Children from underserved communities have the same dreams and aspirations as any other child. Their current situation serves as a temporary crutch. We met a pilot, a soldier, a doctor, many teachers, nurses, and politicians when we asked the children in the Kuchigoro IDP camp what they wanted to be in the future.

Dreams require wings to fly, and iAfrica provides that wing. No country can truly thrive until its population is educated.  Helping them learn to read, write, and communicate will help them escape their current state of poverty, forcing many people to leave the slums in search of better living conditions and/or staying back and turning the slums into wealth creation centres.

Most importantly, as women become more aware of birth control alternatives, population growth will moderate, and infant mortality will decrease as living conditions improve. This will also have a direct impact on the country's GDP, as more young people enter the workforce through entrepreneurship.

The major KPI for measuring our success is the number of children we have successfully transitioned from being unable to read/bad readers and writers to proficient readers and writers.

We are currently using Microsoft Teams to run iAfrica, but we plan to develop our own learning management system in the future. When fully developed, our learning management system will include gamification, student assessment and performance management, chat, advanced reporting, and blended learning features, among other things.

Diversity: Nigeria is a very diverse country with over 250 ethnic groups, with the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo ethnic groups accounting for the majority of the population. Because the out-of-school problem in Nigeria is so widespread and affects all the states in the country, the iAfrica team is comprised of people from various ethnic groups in Nigeria who were chosen based on two criteria: (1) their passion for the iAfrica vision and mission, and (2) their access to the affected children and stakeholders. We are also discussing a partnership with an NGO that focuses on education data gathering across different parts of Nigeria.

Equity: The iAfrica Cloud School charter accommodates children and people of all social classes and ethnicities, and it is free of religious and/or socio-political bias. Every underserved Nigerian child, as well as those in schools with limited access to quality educational resources, receives the same level of attention.

Inclusion: The iAfrica approach is entirely inclusive, which is why our strategy for lowering the number of out-of-school children is based on the 'community cell' method, which allows each child to continue studying in their environment. Regardless of their function, we ensure that every member of the iAfrica team is appreciated and valued. At iAfrica, we think that our success is contingent on how at ease and valued our many stakeholders are.

As we have indicated in other parts of this application, our business is education with a focus on literacy for children in affluent, low-income, and underserved communities with an emphasis on reading, writing and oral communication.  We pride ourselves on the quality of our programs which is evidenced by our graduates being offered admissions to some of the best schools in the world, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States of America.  The value we offer is creating a society where our youths have the tools needed for lifelong learning and the ability to be gainfully employed or become entrepreneurs.  Our goal is to alleviate poverty in all its ramifications including reducing child marriages, teenage pregnancy which emanates from cases of rape, and youth unemployment.

We deliver our products and services in two formats.  For our tuition-paying students, we offer a school campus environment of a private-for-profit education with mandated regular in-class attendance and standard course curriculum for K-12 education on a semester/term system.  For the low-income and underserved communities, we offer our products and services through an online Learning Management System offering K-12 qualitative education.  The online delivery system allows each designated community Cell to structure instruction and timing based on the community requirements with the same level of teacher participation and quality teaching resources used in private nursery and primary schools.

To become financially sustainable, we are focusing on establishing three revenue streams.  In addition to the tuition and fund-raising revenues, we are working on developing fee for services by offering our programs and services to various state and local governments for use in public schools.  These services include providing an online Learning Management System offering K-12 qualitative education, training programs for their teachers, educators, and administrators to enhance their delivery capabilities and provide expertise in evaluating public schools’ curricula of these government agencies and ministries to ensure that they can deliver the needed tools to their pupils for life-long learning towards reducing poverty in their various communities.

Our financial sustainability is predicated on established two revenue streams. Revenues from tuition and fundraising.  The tuition revenues are based on enrolled student capacity which has been steady for over a decade.  We maintain a student capacity of 1502 with about 40% on corporate or family member scholarships.  This provides for a steady income stream that allows us to budget, maintain adequate staffing, and implement programs.

The other revenue stream is our fundraising which we do year-round and for specific projects.  For example, in launching our pilot projects at the camps for internally displaced children we developed budgets and asked several of our cooperative friends and individuals to fund each aspect of the program. The budget breakdown allows for each donor to specify which aspects of the program they are supporting and at what levels.  This approach has made it easy for us to collect small amounts from a large donor base.