Bridging the Gap for rural East African learners

Rural and marginalized districts in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda face many challenges in providing quality education. These challenges have now been magnified after recent school closures due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, although to varying degrees. Uganda, in particular, has experienced the longest school closure in the world. The World Bank found an over 30% decrease in the number of learners engaged in school activities before and after the pandemic, where students were out of school for 22 months. Comparatively, Tanzanian schools were only closed for three months. Although Tanzanian schools were closed for a shorter period of time due to the pandemic, students suffer annually from a shift in language of instruction when moving from primary to secondary school. In primary school, students are taught completely in Swahili, while in secondary school, they are taught completely in English. The shift in language of instruction discourages learners and leads to a low transition rate 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.

Each of the three East African countries requires specific explanation to address the gap in learning created by Covid and existing previously, however similar problems touch all three countries: 1) Covid-19 severely set back all learners 2) Rural and marginalized communities do not have access to online learning opportunities due limited access to devices, internet and electricity and 3) Youth are lacking the skills necessary to deal with the world beyond the classroom. 

Although education is now free and school enrollment has increased, the number of resources provided to schools has remained constant-- leading resources to be 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.

Through its Bridging the Gap initiative, Asante Africa provides a three pronged approach to increase access to online learning opportunities for rural and remote East African learners: 

1. Supporting formal education through strengthening their age-appropriate skills, creating a safe environment to experiment, learn, and fail forward, and cheering them on as they succeed. We do this by providing access to Life skills curriculum which creates pathways for youth ranging from age 9-18 covering Job readiness, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Sexual and Reproductive health, Human Rights, Critical thinking and Problem solving. 

2. Building an ICT Infrastructure to access life skills programs within and beyond the school 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 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 bases. This “human” part of the system makes it possible for deployment on areas without access to the internet.

3. 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.

Our solution serves 8,340 upper primary and secondary school students, youth aged 9-18. Across three countries, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, we are rolling out our Bridging the Gap Program which enhances our existing programming with advanced digital tools in 139 existing Asante Africa program schools (23 primary and 25 secondary in Kenya, 50 secondary and 18 primary in Tanzania and 10 primary and 16 secondary in Uganda). In each school we select 60 students to be directly impacted by the program, creating a total direct impact of 8,340 students in 2022. 

In Tanzania and Uganda, 100% of the schools we work in have zero digital resources and technologies before our intervention, whereas in Kenya schools are supplied by the government with a classroom set of tablets. We utilize government resources where available to accelerate our programming. We purposefully work in ‘off the paved road’, ‘last mile’ communities that NGOs do not normally reach due to distance and cost. 

Our solution exposes youth to digital devices and accelerates learning by providing supplementary curriculum for individual and self-paced learning. Students are also provided with an age-appropriate skills curriculum covering sexual reproductive health, entrepreneurship and savings skills, and leadership and job readiness skills. The curriculum enhances students' learning by providing them with critical thinking, problem solving and team building skills. Teachers are also impacted with an advanced learning system that allows them to assign tasks to learners and assess their progress automatically. 

 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 Foundation is an alliance of four independently governed organizations in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and the United States of America. All program design, implementation and MEL activities take place in East Africa by locally-led staff and governing bodies. In each country, staff is 100% local, coming from the communities in which we are working. In Tanzania, we have two regional offices in Arusha and Tanga. In Kenya, we have three regional offices in Narok, Nairobi and Turkana. In Uganda, we have one office located in Kampala. These offices position us perfectly to work in the regions and counties we serve. Since our team comes from the communities in which we work, we ensure all team members speak the local languages of the particular community in which we are working. Our Arusha team, for example, who are implementing in Monduli district of Arusha region speak Swahili, Maasai and English, to ensure they can communicate effectively with every member of the community. 

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. 

Since Asante Africa’s inception in 2011, we have impacted 154,000 students in 330 schools with our age-appropriate life skills programming and 594,000 youth organization wide. Our experience working with rural and marginalized populations ideally positions us for implementing our Bridging the Gap program throughout the three countries. 

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 programming has seen many successes in increasing the quality of education for students in remote areas of East Africa and is ready to be scaled up to new regions and countries, creating new leaders and change makers throughout the region. Not only do we want to scale up our current programming, equipping additional youth with the skills they need to succeed beyond the classroom, we also wish to increase their access to digital tools and individual-paced learning curriculums which will allow learners to make up for the missed time in school due to Covid-19 pandemic. 

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 31 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. 

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. The pandemic showed us the importance of technology in learning and we were ready to adapt. Our teams used our technology independently in each country we work to create localized solutions. In Uganda, due to long school closures, our staff created community learning groups for youth to gather and study, learn and develop skills together. Groups consisted of 5-10 youth who met, socially distanced, at local community centers. Asante Africa staff supplied them with digital tools to take them through Asante Africa skills curriculum and ensure their learning continued throughout the pandemic. In Tanzania, since schools resumed after only three months, our youth were able to continue learning through school clubs. In Kenya, the government already supplies schools with tablets, so we are able to use the available technology and make it accessible to youth. Without the proper training from Asante Africa on how to use the tools to supplement learning, they remain locked away in a school store, far from the reach of students. Our technology is easily adaptable for the context of the local community. 

In addition to our technology being easily adaptable and localizable, Asante Africa provides schools with digital libraries and our Leadership and Entrepreneurship curriculum. 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 in its innovative Learn-Do-Teach methodology and girl-led programming. Asante Africa’s Learn-Do-Teach 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, encouraging them to teach the others in their community what they have learned. We have noted a catalytic effect through our Pay-it-Forward programming, seeing that on average every one youth impacted by Asante Africa skills development impacts another five outside of the program, increasing our impact five fold. 

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 the next year we aim to impact 8,340 directly with our bridging the gap program, providing schools who have already been part of Asante Africa programming with the digital tools necessary to succeed in the 21st century. We expect to see an indirect impact of 41,700 youth through our catalytic pay-it-forward method. 

 Our commitment to the future of education is ensuring every child is an active participant in their development. We accomplish this by bringing quality education and life skills training to rural East African youth with the strategic goal of a measurable impact on more than 1.6 million lives by 2025. We work to proactively prepare youth to be contributors in the global economy with strong moral leadership, respect for the planet, and commitment to partnerships to ensure sustainable success. 

 In 2020/21, COVID-19 provided an opportunity to reimagine education and fully understand that learning does not stop at the classroom walls. To ensure vulnerable youth are not left behind in the wake of COVID, we expanded our Beyond the Classroom initiative to include remote learning through a digital learning management system. 

 We are dedicated to the Learn-Do-Teach pedagogy throughout our academic and life skill programs with focus on skill development, active learning, community contribution and strengthening resilience. We achieve this by

• Providing youth with tablets for remote learning 

• Supporting youth education through scholarships, school facilities and essentials, mentoring, English language classes

• Deepening Financial literacy and digital skills through financial awareness in primary schools, secondary school savings clubs, teacher and ICT training

• Developing Age-Appropriate Life Skills to deepen adolescent advancement including actively involving boys in our girls’ programs

• Expanding the Leadership and Entrepreneurship Program empowering young adult networks with career opportunities within their community

• Creating an active alumni network to provide mentoring, connections to opportunities, and community outreach.

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, 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

100% schools with clubs have plans to sustain beyond Asante Africa support

95% clubs active for 3 years post Asante Africa 

90% youth spearhead advocacy at community level 

40% youth business plans receive financing

We use several indicators to measure our progress toward our impact goals including school attendance, academic improvement, percentage transition from primary to secondary school, percentage decrease in dropout due to pregnancy, number of innovation/enterprise clubs created, knowledge of sexual and reproductive health rights, improved male attitudes toward gender-based violence. 

Thus far we have seen 

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

Asante Africa’s Theory of Change for Accelerating Academic, Life  and Livelihood Skills Development: 

The young people of East Africa will determine their own futures and the futures of their countries. With education, mentoring, skills, and opportunities they are becoming the positive catalyst for change. These young people are creating social transformation and stimulating economic growth in their communities, countries, and continent. They are creating local alternatives to urban and external migration. Our model is built using two reputable elements; LEARN-DO-TEACH and PAY-IT-FORWARD.

“Learn-Do-Teach” methodology is a recognized educational concept, typically inside a classroom. Research shows that a passive learner retains a maximum of 30% of the information. If they progress to using their hands and mind in a skill-building project, they will retain about 75%. If they teach their knowledge to another, they will retain and utilize around 90% of the knowledge. This approach has been integrated in and outside classrooms and in every Asante Africa Foundation program. Our youth: Learn life skills by developing personalized roadmaps, creating entrepreneurship and employability awareness, communication competencies, and in-depth application of leadership skills in school-based clubs with alumni mentors, do with hands-on experimentation that turns concepts into reality and ideas into action, paving the way for community enterprises and workforce creation and teach, generating momentum by educated and empowered youth and creating ripples of change across villages, counties, and national borders. 

Pay-it-Forward, is the second foundational element. It is based on a replication model of supporting 3 additional individuals, and then challenging them to support 3 more people. Every participant observes local challenges, employs ideation and innovation tools, and proposes solutions followed by action, thus developing cognitive skills, decision-making capacity, innovation, and leadership qualities. This instills confidence, provides practice in knowledge application, and enables young people to become active leaders in their homes and communities.

The Youth who graduate from our program are equipped with quality education and prepared to successfully transition from school to life beyond the classroom as self-confident leaders, entrepreneurs and skilled workers, widening their career choices and improving their chances of creating and sustaining businesses.

Our program is powered by ICT systems that are an integral of different solutions originally designed for different purposes. The system includes the following:

Hybrid (Offline/online) Learning Management System

Our high-end LMS ensures that we are able to not only dispense content, but help monitor how:

1. Learners interact with our content

2. Teachers interact with Learners

3. Teachers interact with the training content.

This informs our decision on best pedagogies and suitability of content to support the learning needs in school. This kind of Monitoring and evaluation has helped us build very effective content for the program. This learner management system is hosted on low cost servers that are located in the schools. The Learner Management system also has an App version running on a learner digital device that enables learners to download and use content every time they are away from the offline school servers. The app syncs data to the school server whenever in close proximity and does the following; (1) Download more lessons (2) submit data on usage from the learner. The school administration can now access this data for decision-making. The third feature of the LMS is as an online portal. To help coordinate projects on remote areas- the program has set up regional support hubs that are connected to the internet. Our field officers have master facilities that collect data from all the schools offline and later sync them to an online data portal weekly. This data is used by Asante Africa for decision making. 

Solar Powered Digital Smart kits

Working in rural areas, mostly without access to electricity, we have designed a solar powered  portable digital smart kit to support learning in the most rural areas of East Africa.

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

The key resources we use in our social business canvas model are our staff, technologies and finances. In order to succeed we need experienced and knowledgeable staff who can adapt our programs to the communities in which they work. Our key stakeholders are the government, teachers and heads of school, parents and students. Our key activities are providing schools with our learning management system, ICT training, monitoring and evaluation and fundraising. Our value proposition is to provide quality education to students in rural East Africa despite lack of resources and low-connectivity in their communities. Our impact is measured by increased student attendance, increased student performance, increased transition from primary to secondary school and decrease in dropout due to pregnancy. We provide our customers with quarterly impact reports to their specifications. The type of intervention is a program which is monitored and supported by Asante Africa staff. Our segments or beneficiaries are in-school youth aged 9-18 in rural schools throughout East Africa. Our customers are socially minded individuals, corporates working in East Africa and grant funders. Our channels are through school and school district governments, who identify schools in need and introduce our programming to heads of schools and potential program participants. Our cost structure can be broken down into 90% programs,3% fundraising and 7% administrative. In 2021 our revenue came from 64% grants, 30% individual donors, and 6% corporate donors.

Asante Africa Foundation strives to attain diversified revenue streams to manage risks and ensure sustainability.  Our five-year strategic plan includes revenue consisting of 14% corporate sponsorship, 42% individual donations, 42% grants, and 2% products and services. To achieve this diversification, we are taking the following steps:

1.  Conduct a competitive assessment to benchmark a service-based revenue stream - Our long-term goal is to generate revenue through a fee-for-service business model to include a certification program that targets other social enterprises as clients. We are currently testing a model where we open our yearly conferences on Leadership and Entrepreneurship to students outside of our program, who are able to afford attending themselves. As of now, our conferences are only for our fully-funded Asante Africa students. In the future, we see this as a viable revenue generating option which we plan to expand upon in the coming year. 

2. Develop funders and learning partners willing to make a multi-year commitment to the replication and scaling of our proven model.

3. Develop multiple funding and implementing partners that have committed to investing in long-term capacity-building for the organization. Asante Africa Foundation is currently introducing the organizational five-year strategy plan to these grant makers.

4. Develop an alumni connection program which includes a donation-based networking service to assist with career development through Asante Africa Foundation.

The organization does not exceed expenditures of over 20% of total income for a given fiscal year on activities outside of East Africa, including staffing of the marketing, finance, and fundraising teams.

Thus far, we have succeeded in making significant progress in three of the four strategies in our five year plan.

1. Revenue-generation model: We have successfully conducted two trainings in Tanzania that were for-profit and able to help us fund our additional programming. We are prospecting another five for the coming year. 

2. Multi-year funding opportunities: One notable step toward securing multi-year funding is receiving the Start Small Grant from Jack Dorsey and Twitter. We are applying to several multiple grant opportunities in 2022 as well. 

3. Securing Funding and Implementing Partners: We are pursuing not only long term funding partners, but also implementing partners that may allow us to expand our impact. These implementing partners include Ubongo Kids, TAI Tanzania and The Tanzanian Education Institute (TIE) as well as Lewa Conservancy in Kenya. Through working with TAI, TIE and Ubongo Kids, we have been able to secure additional digital content that is relevant to the youth we are working with. By creating partnerships, we are maximizing our joint impact, without duplicating efforts.