Teleschools Digital Education System

1. NIGERIA - UNREGULATED SCHOOLS & OUT OF SCHOOL CHILDREN

Lagos State, which is Nigeria's second most populous state and its economic capital, has about 6.5 million children in primary and secondary schools out of which only about 1 million are catered for by the State's organised public schools service. The other 5.5 million children are served by 17,000 private schools of which only about 5002 are registered and regulated. Roughly only 40% of the children in Lagos State have access to education content and pedagogy, regulated and monitored to guarantee quality standards approved by both local and international education authorities.

Nigeria's Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) database indicates about 23 million students were registered in primary schools across Nigeria in 2014. Applying a 2.6% annual population growth factor brings that figure to about 26 million students as at the end of 2019. Adjusting the split of regulated to unregulated schools upwards to 50/50 gives about 13 million Nigerian primary school students receiving education of a quality undetermined, unregulated and probably unable to deliver to its recipients any significant advantage to succeed in life.

For Nigerian secondary or high school students, UBEC indicates about 9 million students registered nationwide in 2014. This extrapolates to about 10.2 million students at the end of 2019. Half of that figure, or slightly over 5 million, are secondary school students being tutored in unregulated institutions that may not provide them with a level playing field to compete with their more privileged counterparts.

Education for the poorest of Nigeria’s rural children, who have poor or no access to physical structures set up for learning – i.e. brick and mortar schools - is perhaps the most urgent priority requiring broad-scale collaboration across the ICT ecosystem. Every day that Nigeria’s over 20 million rural children cannot access a regulated and standardised learning platform, to give them a level playing field to compete with their urban peers, is a major disenfranchisement to them. There are also more than 10 million Almajiri children or urban Northern street urchins, condemned to a bleak future of street begging once they graduate from Koranic recital school, which is the only form of education they will ever receive.

2. NIGERIA - DISPLACED CHILDREN DUE TO INSURGENCY & TERRORIST ACTIVITY

Borno State, epicentre of Nigeria's Boko Haram insurgency, has lost over 5000 classrooms in last fifteen years to internally bred terrorist activities. This translates to about 120,000 children denied their right to education and a foundation for a good quality of life. Primary education in Borno State has received a terrible blow, with hundreds of thousands of children out of school for varying periods since the insurgency began over a decade ago.

Most important and urgent is the need to get these children back into school. However, 5000 classrooms translates to about 200 schools. Assuming twenty staff required per school (including 10 multi-subject teachers), the Governor would require over $3 million, to cover salaries for a single year. In five years, he would spend almost $15 million on salaries only.

Assuming Borno State managed to construct 25 cheap, bare plastered wall classrooms for each school for just $10,000, that's another $2 million expended, with no furniture, staff offices, teaching aids or civil amenities provided. Realistically, Borno State would require over $50 million, spread over a 5 year period, to recreate the 5000 classrooms. If you add other States in Northern Nigeria that are facing the same crisis, the number of schoolchildren involved would approach a million and the costs to put them back in school would balloon into hundreds of millions of dollars. The State governments involved simply don't have the money.

3. UKRAINE - 500,000 TO 1 MILLION CHILDREN REFUGEES

Ukrainian refugees admitted into neighbouring countries have topped 2.7 million persons so far.  As of 9th March 2022, Poland had taken in 1,412,502 refugees; Hungary 214,160; Slovakia 165,199; Russia 97,098; Romania 84,671; Moldova 82,762 and Belarus 765. More than 255,000 people have gone to other European countries (BBCNews - UN Data).

In recent weeks, the Ukrainian Education ministry, aided by UNICEF launched an online kindergarten featuring educational and developmental videos for children aged 3-6,to help parents engage their children in educational and developmental activities, and to take their minds off the war as much as possible.

In a few weeks’ time, the number of Ukrainian refugees will cross the three million persons mark and the number of displaced schoolchildren will exceed a million. That's roughly 1,400 primary and secondary (high) schools at full capacity. Neighbouring countries and the EU school systems cannot absorb over1 million Ukrainian school children in the next 3-6 months.

Even if all 27 EU countries were to spread the displaced Ukrainian children around evenly, each country would have to create at least 50 schools to cater for them. They would altogether require about 28,000 teachers or about 1 billion euros in annual teachers' compensation. This assessment doesn't include the curriculum, language and culture transition that would present challenges to the affected children.

4. GLOBAL OUT OF SCHOOL CHILDREN

UNESCO Institute for Statistics estimates that about 258 million children and youth are out of school, according to UIS data for the school year ending in 2018. The total includes 59 million children of primary school age, 62 million of lower secondary school age and 138 million of upper secondary age.

Teleschools Digital Education system delivers digital education with high quality pedagogy, content and ambience. With Teleschools, every child, regardless of social status or location, has access to high quality education comparable to that offered in mid-tier private schools.

Teleschools takes education at all levels out of the four walls of brick and mortar classrooms to students anywhere and everywhere, through digital media and communication channels across urban and rural communities. 

Teleschools provides a rapidly deployable alternative to the high setup and maintenance costs for brick and mortar schools. It also reduces the need for expensive data access for digital learning. Teleschools provides capability to digitally recreate and manage large numbers of entire schools for a fraction of the traditional model costs, mainly by centralizing the curriculum and pedagogy elements and by creating digital equivalent for the physical classroom interaction.

Teleschools utilizes Digital TV broadcast technology to achieve widest possible reach, based on high TV ownership in developing and developed regions and across socio-economic groups. It also taps into the unrestricted reach of satellite broadcast signal across wide geographical areas. Multicast digital TV broadcast offers massive economies of scale, to reduce cost of education content delivery per student, based on significant enrolment of schools on a State or Regional basis, multicast TV fixed total cost per broadcast stream and defined coverage area. This reduces cost of the service proportionately per student as the user base increases.

Teleschools employs Mobile Telephony (Voice and text) to achieve teacher to students and also student to student interactivity in order to deliver classroom ambience for students and their teachers. It also uses Satellite based content transfer service to enable teachers disseminate assignments and tutorial material to students.

Teleschools' Advertising-revenue-based financing meaning there will be no recurrent charges to students after they have acquired access equipment for Teleschools’ service.

Its locally assembled low cost access equipment costs significantly less (about one third or less) compared to cost of equipment or smart devices required for Internet based online learning.

Digital technology provides a leapfrog solution to get quality education across to out of school, unconnected and displaced children in an economically sustainable way that guarantees them a fair chance for a good quality of life. However, there is the challenge of annuity costs associated with Internet access based digital learning as well as the cost of sophisticated equipment required to access such digital learning systems. These are disincentives for the spread of digital education, especially in economically challenged geographies.

Teleschools provides a low cost but high quality, rapid back to school solution for children forced to discontinue onsite, regular schooling due to socio-economic, health, political, military, criminal or otherwise originated adverse activity that has resulted in restriction of movement, limitation of physical interaction and/or displacement locally or internationally.

Teleschools enables children who are victims of backward socio-cultural or religious practices , as well as children affected by communal unrest, violence and even war, to resume and continue their schooling in safe, offsite locations with the comfort of familiar teachers, school curriculum and pedagogy. They are also able to access high quality standardized classroom content comparable with the high fee paying schools.

All this is made available at a fraction of the cost associated with Internet access based digital learning and therefore expands tremendously the reach of Teleschools Digital Education System within extremely economically disadvantaged economies, regions and communities where it is nearly impossible to physically aggregate the necessary components required for good quality education delivery.

Teleschools team consists of versatile experienced professionals and global service providers who have been involved with providing technology and telecommunications services and also consumer goods to consumers in developing economies on two continents and one sub-continent - Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This has afforded the team the ability to identify low cost solution models to address needs of populations in economies where infrastructure is underdeveloped, income is suboptimal and there are few to none existing support systems to aid the spread of technology and provide ease of access to modern goods and services.

The team consists mainly of Nigerians, raised and trained in Nigeria, who have worked in different parts of the world across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, gathering experience and skills in best practices and global success models for delivering world class solutions in developing markets. They are able to bring their experience to bear in designing accessible and affordable solutions to life in sustainable models that can be rapidly expanded across disparate terrains.

The Non-Nigerians in the team have very deep experience and familiarity with Africa, Middle East and European markets where they have provided and continue to provide highly customised and localised services that improve the lives of the consumers they serve.

Teleschools lead and its main visioner, Olanrewaju Oke, had previously led the most successful digital enrollment of the educational sector in the early days of broadband telecommunication expansion in Nigeria in the early 2000s. This was formally and nationally acknowledged by the Nigerian Telecommunications regulator. Also, MTN, the most successful mobile operator in Nigeria and in Africa, is perhaps the single most significant private corporate contributor to the development of education in Nigeria through its CSR activities.

The biggest support Teleschools requires now is believers who will facilitate access to the school children who require its services. In the last two years, Teleschools has approached several State (Regional) governments in Nigeria whose school children face issues of restricted movement, displacement and disconnection from their schools due to COVID-19 pandemic and the security issues resulting from the endemic insurgency in the Northern regions. As Teleschools moves to expand its operations to cater to economically disadvantaged Nigerian children and also the displaced Ukrainian children now dispersed across several countries, it will require facilitators who will encourage the stakeholders in the education of these affected children to embrace what may be a significantly unconventional solution emerging from an unlikely part of the world.

Beyond this, Teleschools will require partnership with logistics and project management partners who know how to make the seemingly impossible look like a cakewalk. Putting over a million schoolchildren in disparate locations back in school with thousands of their teachers in similarly disparate locations will not be easy or convenient but there are those gifted to see what the regular eye cannot see and who are able to plan and execute flawlessly, even in the midst of chaos. They are critical partners for Teleschools and what we do.

Finally, international, national and regional policy makers are required as partners, who will take digital learning beyond intervention during crisis periods and make it an integral part of the basic education policy and a complementary learning system alongside onsite, in-classroom learning. As the world advances technologically and services become increasingly mobile and personalised, school systems need to proactively integrate digital learning systems into their operations and promote blended learning as the default system. This would ensure that events which had previously led to prolonged cessation of learning for children across the world would no longer have such debilitating impact as affected children would switch to digital mode and continue their learning regardless.

In summary, Teleschools is:

1. A uniform and level learning platform that eliminates quality of education gaps between children from well off segments of our communities and children from less privileged segments. It is also a self-financing model.

2. Low barrier access to digital learning for school children in preparation for full online engagement when cost of online access and devices fall within reach of all children of basic schooling age.

3. A low cost, rapid intervention and recovery model to protect continuity of education for schools and school children in distressed communities with restricted movement, limitation of physical contact and interaction or mass displacement caused, among other things, by natural disasters, breakout of pandemic or acts of violence, including attacks on educational facilities, kidnap and/or assault of students  and teachers, and acts of war.

4. A digital registration platform for all students which would evolve into the most comprehensive National and State basic education database in the history of the Nigeria and eventually globally.  This will, in turn, enable more robust administration of the education sector on a data-driven basis.

5. A digital switchover accelerator or public digital catalyst that will rapidly drive up digital engagement levels among families of children of basic education age, thereby creating a ready base to receive other innovative digital services that Nigeria and other participating nations may have to offer to its citizenry on an individual or family basis.

In comparison to the myriad of existing Internet access based digital learning systems, Teleschools' unique competitive advantage is that it finds a way around most of the economy and infrastructure challenges that have limited other digital education solutions to just 30% addressable segment of school children in Nigeria due to limited access to broadband connectivity.

Teleschools enhances the excellent work done by Internet based learning solutions by extending access to digital education to millions of Nigerian children who are currently excluded from the 'school without walls' experience that digital learning offers.

Teleschools will enable our children in public schools and low income private schools experience high quality of pedagogy and curriculum that would be otherwise practically impossible for them to gain access to. Further, it would enable and encourage them to begin to assimilate knowledge at their own pace. Behind this, it will provide the teachers with a more versatile, data based approach to monitoring their students engagement, participation and learning.

Teleschools is a major innovative step in the right direction for schools and also for the Ministry of Education in all States (Regions) of Nigeria as digital education is the future and has become an ongoing feature of education delivery even now that the COVID-19 lockdowns are all gone and physical classroom teaching has resumed nationwide and in most countries around the world.

Teleschools is a digital platform for schools and not for individual learners. It subscribes to the philosophy that the school ecosystem is still the best learning environment for children of basic education age and it employs technology to ensure that children can remain in school and continue to learn even when physical conditions are not conducive.

1. Immediate term (1-12 months)

Rapid enrolment of schools, deployment of access equipment and resumption of schooling for over 1 million Ukrainian displaced school children now dispersed mainly into Hungary, Poland, Slovak Republic, Moldova, and Romania, among other countries in Europe.

Achieve initial enrolment of schools in most affected Northern Nigerian States to put at least 250,000 children back in school.

2. Mid term (1-2 years)

Phased deployment of Teleschools in Nigerian public schools across at least 30% of States in Nigeria (12 States) to support blended learning across all levels of basic schooling curriculum. We will select 2500 Public schools (about 1.5 to 2 million students) with most financially capable students and implement full remote learning readiness via deployment in homes of all the students and teachers. This can be financed by State governments or by lease-to-own arrangement with largest banks who already have parents of the students as their customers.

Commence enrolment of first batch of out of school Nigerian children to reach at least 10% or about 3 million children by creating digital schools for them where they can commence formal learning. Work with governments of States where the children are located to transition them to mobile aggregated physical gatherings to create semblance of blended learning environment.

Respond to distressed environment or displaced schools and school children in at least two new geographies

3. Long term (3-5 years)

Expand Teleschools system home deployments to reach 50%+ of Nigerian public schools and 10-15% of low-income private schools to further enhance remote learning readiness. This could reach as many as six million students nationwide.

Expand enrolment among out of school Nigerian children to reach at least 30% or about 9 million children.

Respond to distressed environment or displaced schools and school children in at least five new geographies

4. Longer Term (5+ years)

Expand Teleschools system home deployment to reach 100% of Nigerian public schools and at least 50% of low-income private schools. This could reach as many as twelve million students nationwide. Showcase States that have achieved at least 75-80% digital services inclusion among school children versus current 30-40%.

Expand enrolment among out of school Nigerian children to reach at least 75% or about 27 million children. By then, the blended mobile aggregation + digital learning schools should have become a national template for use to eventually eliminate completely issue of out of school children.

Respond to distressed environment or displaced schools and school children in at least one new geography every other year.

Teleschools' long term goal is to ensure that no child is left behind in the adoption of a digital learning system that will present a level playing field for our children in Nigeria regardless of their socioeconomic status.

Our effort will start from the urban less privileged children to our children in rural and excluded areas. Addressing the latter group will involve forming digital  collaboration ecosystems that will help to address the different areas of outage including lack of power, lack of devices and maybe even TVs that are not compatible with digital technology.

We will also approach our Northern region governments work with local and international donors and humanitarian agencies to implement Teleschools digital learning system for children of internally displaced persons in temporary or resettlement locations. This will do much to lessen the anxiety of the parents and the governments and it will also ensure there is minimal disruption to the education of the affected students.

Finally, Teleschools will seek for partnerships to address the millions of street children who are victims of the now questionable Almajjiri syndrome whereby little children are taken out of homes and handed to Islamic tutors who are unable to cater for them and therefore send them to the streets to beg for food.

Teleschools primary measure of progress towards its goals will come from government statistics of regulated and unregulated schools. As more schools come into the Teleschools space, they will have access to the kind of pedagogy and curriculum that will give them confidence to appear on the regulator supervised database of schools. Regulators will be comfortable to advertise the quality of Content being passed on these hitherto unlisted and unregulated schools and students.

Also, performance of the enrolled schools at key exit point exams will give an indication of their performance improvement due to exposure to high quality curriculum and pedagogy, or otherwise.

The response of stakeholders to sponsor enrolment of schools into the Teleschools system will also give good indication of how satisfied the stakeholders are with Teleschools performance and testify as confirmation of its benefits to schools and school children in their constituency.

Also, reports from local Country Office of Statistics alongside international reports from UNICEF, UNHCR, WHO, World Bank and other global agencies will be used to gauge Teleschools' success in providing rapid return to classroom solutions for children in distressed environments who are confronted with restricted movement and/or mass displacement resulting in disruption of their education.

Nigeria has grappled with a drastic drop in the quality of its tertiary education graduates over the last 60+ years since independence. Its population has grown rapidly and outstripped the education infrastructure and resources. Sadly, this drop in quality can be traced all the way back to basic education stages where millions of Nigerian children attend unregulated schools with poorly trained teachers, incomplete curriculum, appalling physical learning conditions and poor to no technical learning aids.

This is compounded by situations in which extreme poverty and distressed situations create significant out of school gaps for many children, condemning them to low quality livelihood sustained by menial jobs or to criminal pursuits for the rest of their lives.

Teleschools Digital Education System will close these gaps by enabling the affected children gain access to the quality of education that will give them a leg up in life. They will be able to survive the harsh conditions of their early life without losing their ticket out of poverty. They will also not face a bleak future due to challenges posed by hostile environment that would have otherwise cut short their schooling.

Giving these children a stronger start in life will mean that fewer of them end up at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder or in criminal professions and will create open skies for more children in Nigeria and also in other nations and geographies where Teleschools provides its solutions. 

Teleschools utilizes Satellite communication technology to provide a much cheaper alternative to establishment and operating costs of brick and mortar schools. It also delivers benefits of digital education to large groups of recipients without the high recurrent cost associated with Broadband Internet access:

Satellite Television technology offers broadcast services in which the same information is transmitted from a single point to multiple recipients.

Satellite bandwidth high costs can be reduced to a minimized cost per user based on aggregation of a significant number of users. It is therefore possible to acquire enough users to make Satellite TV cost per user almost insignificant.

Wide coverage of Satellite footprints means a single point Satellite broadcast is able to cater to large groups of users who are very widely dispersed geographically without major investment in terrestrial infrastructure as is the case with terrestrial TV.

Digital receiver equipment for Satellite TV is comparatively cheaper than smart devices used for Internet based learning. Teleschools delivers pre-recorded or real-time (streamed) education content to children wherever they are and at marginal to no cost depending on the funding structure employed.

A single teacher teaching a specific subject relevant a school year or level can serve hundreds of thousands, or even millions of students in different locations across the country.

Teleschools also use mobile telecommunication technology to provide the interactive platform for teachers and students at much lower cost than use of Internet access. This will be deployed via the mobile Closed User Group service which combines SMS with Voice service delivered to closed teams at heavily discounted rates versus regular network charges.

This is particularly effective in Africa where poverty and successive poor governance has resulted in limited or poor infrastructure rollout in most countries. The deep penetration of digital mobile telephony provides a technology leapfrog opportunity to deliver digital technology benefits to populations that cannot afford more sophisticated access channels.

Teleschools is an equal opportunity employer. We seek to build a team that will represent the ethnic and cultural diversity of Nigeria while also fielding top performers in different professional roles. In our international operations, we will reflect balance across genders and embrace cultural and geographical diversity to create a non-discriminatory work environment.

Our leadership team of twelve Nigerian professionals consists of two women who lead the Educational services and Customer service functions. The project leader for our largest corporate team member is a female with corporate commercial responsibility for Africa as a territory. Also, our project Finance intern is a female banker.  Further recruitment activity will follow our corporate outlook of inclusiveness and promotion of diversity.

We will recruit staff and contractors based on their capability, competence and their commitment to deliver results. Their gender will not be a basis for advantage or disadvantage at any point during the qualification and selection process.

Beneficiaries: Children of basic education school age unable to afford sustained access to broadband Internet for digital learning. Also children in disconnected locations and those in distressed envoironments facing interruption or cessation of the schooling.

Service/Type of intervention: High quality Digital Education access for children of basic education school age in urban, rural and disadvantaged or distressed locations.

User Value Proposition: Access to high quality education content and pedagogy via inclusive digital learning system

Customers: Schools, governments, corporate sponsors, donors and humanitarian organisations.

Customer Value Proposition: High quality Education delivered to disadvantaged and displaced children in a cost effective, rapidly deployable and highly scalable model.

Key Stakeholders: Parents, Teachers, School Administrators, Heads of government agencies and public institutions with responsibility for education sector, Humanitarian organisations.

Social Impact; Equitable digital education system that levels out the gaps between urban poor, rural primary and secondary school students and their more socioeconomically endowed counterparts. Crisis response education system that minimises impact of environmental distress on basic education.

Major support requirement: High level (government) endorsement to schools to achieve critical mass enrolment and rapid activation.

Partners: Satellite platform operator, satellite capacity provider, mobile network operator, digital hardware providers as well as financial institutions.

Key Activities:

1. Recruit, onboard and provision schools digitally.

2. Production and editing of curriculum Content.

 3. Collaboration with commercial partners to secure advertising orders.

Key Resources: fifty personnel covering all functions.

Revenue sources : Government 30%, Sponsors 20%, Advertising: 50%

First year budget: $1.5 million dollars

Cost structure: Capex, Recurrent costs and salaries. Teleschools will generate self-sustaining revenue via relevant third party advertising.

Surplus: Profits will be invested in enhancing services, connecting highly disadvantaged children and rewarding shareholders, investors and staff.

Students will pay to acquire and install their satellite receiver kit or will be sponsored by education sector philantropists and development partners. Government or corporate sponsors will pay 30% of operations cost for onboarding of schools. The rest of the funds for Teleschools operations will be raised through 3rd party advertising on the platform.

US$1 million to cover production and satellite broadcast costs in Year 1. 50% of this amount will be recovered through advertising revenue and will be used, along with funds from governments and other sponsors to run Year 2.

It is expected that the Ukrainian refugee children intervention will attract funding from various stakeholder interest groups and will not require that longer gestation period for 3rd party advertising revenue negotiation and collection post-advertising performance.

Not relevant as we don't have a running operation yet.