FastTrack

Even before the pandemic, the global learning crisis as reported by the World Bank is unproportionally affecting millions of children’s ability to enrol or remain in school, learn basic literacy and numeracy and transition to higher educational levels. According to a 2021 World Bank’s report, 53% of children in low- and middle-income countries could not read and understand a simple story by the end of primary school, and in poor countries, the level was as high as 80%. Although it is possible to learn later in life with enough efforts, children who don’t read by age 10 – or at the latest, by the end of primary school – usually fail to master reading later in their schooling career.

In Nigeria particularly, the Education Data Survey report shows that 46% of grade 3 children could not read a word and 31% of grade 3 children could not complete a single-digit addition problem. Similarly, as revealed in an independent study conducted in 2019 to assess the foundational skills of over 6000 children across 4 conflict-affected communities in Northern Nigeria in 2019, not only do we see a large proportion of children at low levels of reading, writing and arithmetic, but the variation in each grade is wide. Only 5% could read a basic paragraph in their home language, Hausa; 2% were able to respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to simply written questions in English, and just 3% were able to solve a simple subtraction problem regardless of their class level. Evidently, the ripple effects of the COVID-19 on learning particularly at the primary level is unprecedented and unarguably threatening the future of many children.

Without urgent, contextually-relevant and tailored actions to accelerate learning recovery and re-engage both out-of-school children and school-aged students in active functional and foundational skills development, many children will be grow and live through life without the requisite competencies to participate in any future learning, take up active employment or pursue entrepreneurial ambitions. Addressing gaps in foundational skills development, is therefore, critical to ensure access to quality lifelong learning and sustainable livelihoods.

Our solution, called FastTrack, is a technology-enabled and self-assisted accelerated foundational skills development program designed to enable out-of-school refugee children to acquire functional literacy and numeracy skills which are vital, indispensable skills needed for virtually any further education and to lead an empowered, self-determined life. This solution, currently reaching over 4000 children, is backed by rigorous evidence that points to teaching students at their ability rather than at grade level curriculum as one of the most cost-effective interventions at improving basic literacy and numeracy. Our solution combines 3 proven, independent teaching and learning approaches, namely: 

1. self-assisted technology-enabled Mavis Talking book and pen, an audio-visual, offline solution that enables children to lead their own learning and a digital pen (Mavis Pen™) with audio capabilities and a specially printed book (Mavis Book™) with unique dot patterns and child/learner-friendly graphics to aid understanding and comprehension 

2. the Teaching-at-the-Right-Level methodology, a scalable and effective remedial approach that helps children develop basic reading and mathematics skills, using oral tests to sort children into distinctive groups that match their learning levels; and 

3. mother tongue-based literacy acquisition  model; a dual language approach which involves using Hausa as a bridge to learning English.

Focused on school-aged out-of-school refugee children in refugee camps across Nigeria, FastTrack was conceived to operate and scale as an high-impact, evidence-based literacy and numeracy skills development intervention that leverages innovation, collaboration and technology to improve access to learner-centred curriculum and personalized learning experience for the most marginalized learners. With over 10.5 million out-of-school children across Nigeria and  over 2.3 million children living in displaced communities and refugee settlements without access to any learning opportunities, our solution operates to respond to a very needful deficit in quality provision of functional and foundational competencies within displaced contexts. Using a tri-dimensional teaching and learning model as well as the accelerated education model, our solution is addressing the foundational learning needs of out-of-school children resident in several Internally displaced persons (IDP) camps , giving them the opportunity to develop basic competency in literacy and numeracy needed for self-reliance, further education and future work readiness. Our target population is analyzed as follows 

• User - Children between 5-14 years 

• Target Impact Group - Out-of-school refugee children 

• Market size - Over 16.3 million 

• Addressable market size - 5 million

Supported by a growing network of over 50 community based trainers across our project locations, our program team consists of 8 development professionals with expertise in instructional learning design, monitoring and evaluation, media and advocacy, community engagement, and research and policy. By virtue of our diverse academic backgrounds and professional experiences, we have worked extensively in the field of education and international developmemt and thus built the requisite expertise to educational access issues in Nigeria and regionally. More than 80% of our full-time staff have also worked in the learning design, educational management and digital learning industry and everyone on the leadership team has worked in the Education and technology industry for at least 10 years.

While these individuals will internally lead the implementation of our project, we are working alongside key stakeholders in our project locations (IDP camps and communities) for programme design and management, material development, and measurement. Having adopted 10 IDP communities since our first pilot, we work with trained community liaison officers that are dwellers in the IDP camps as part of our team representation. Most significantly, we carry out rapid assessments across all camps prior to deployment. The aim of this assessment exercise is to understand children's learning needs and ascertain their learning level which cumulatively help us group learners into clusters according to their learning levels rather than age of class level during deployment. As part of our co-design and stakeholder participation principle, we have established a community of practice across all camps where we are currently deploying our solution and each group of COP consist of community liaison officers, camp heads and internal project team members as well as local education authorities, all supporting project design and implementation. Our solution also reflects the contextual realities of each camp and no model is deployed in any camp until we have completed need assessment during baseline study.

As one of the most successful initiatives with a mission to drive innovation to solve world challenges, we believe joining the Solve MIT community would provide us the right opportunity to be a part of an innovation ecosystem that supports individuals and organizations like us driving lasting, transformational impact. Beyond having access to financial gains, our participation in this Challenge presents another opportunity to attract a substantial quantum experience for increasing the effectiveness of our solution. By joining MIT's innovation ecosystem and learning through mentorship from Solve’s expertise in strategy, technology and innovation, we will obtain valuable insight on how to improve on our innovation management processes and further enhance our service delivery across different states with different contextual realities.

As a youth-led impact-driven organisation, having access to Solve's network, technology, and experts is key to enabling improvement in our organizational capacity to strengthen the individual capacity of core team members as they work to improve our monitoring and evaluation mechanisms and leverage partnership opportunities for long-term growth.

We believe that implementing a tech-enabled creative educational program with the potential for large-scale adoption would require adequate financial and human resources for strategic planning and execution, given the most current trend in education, innovation, and technology. Therefore, to enhance the core components of our solution across all implementation contexts, our team members have been exposed to a variety of training and mentorship programs over the last 18 months, including the TaRL Africa 2021 Workshop, LEAP Africa Social Innovators Programme, and the TheirWorld Innovation Masterclass series. Becoming a Solver would enable us to receive mentoring in three key aspects of our solution: innovation management, monitoring and evaluation, and scale-up modeling.

The innovativeness of our solution - a technologically-aided approach to foundational skills development - lies in the unconventional blend of 3 evidence-based learning and teaching approaches which includes; 

1. A self-assisted technology-enabled instruction, which is facilitated through the Mavis Talking book, which is an audio-visual, offline solution that enables children to lead their own learning and a digital pen (Mavis Pen™) with audio capabilities and a specially printed book (Mavis Book™) with unique dot patterns and child/learner-friendly graphics to aid understanding and comprehension.

2. Secondly, a dual language or bilingual model of instruction to learning English, thereby using mother tongue to support learning an additional language,

3. Lastly, the Teaching at the right level methodology that allows us to group children into learning clusters based on learning capabilities or learning needs rather than age or grade; with a firm focus on progressive foundational learning aided by continuous student learning assessments. 

The endline evaluation from our pilot as discussed in sections below further supports the innovativeness and potential of our solution to catalyze foundational skills development for millions of children if adopted at a nationwide scale. This result is unarguably a reflection of how our innovation can enable broader positive impacts across different contexts and a justification for its selection as one of the five winners of TheirWorld first ever Innovation in Education Awards.   

By 2024 FastTrack intends to scale our impact to 10,000 out-of-school refugee children across 10 refugee/IDP camps in 4 states across Northern Nigeria. We will have done so by directly operating our model within these camps with learning sessions delivered by a network of trained facilitators supported through philanthropic donations and grants. 

In 5 years, we plan to scale up FastTRACK as an evidence-based literacy and numeracy intervention to reach 50,000 out-of-school refugees and in-school children living in marginalized communities. We plan to achieve this by:

1. Accreditation of our yearly Teaching Fellowship to recruit indigenous youth as learning leads and facilitators  

2. Adopting a systemic innovation adoption approach through Summer learning camps in partnerships with State Agencies for Mass Education

3. Improving the cost-effectiveness of our innovation through a series of rapid randomized field trials across states to strengthen experimental evidence and inform state-led pedagogical reforms on literacy and numeracy development 

Leveraging the full capacity of our Monitoring and Evaluation team, we plan and conduct biweekly literacy and arithmetic assessments that strengthen the achievement of our outcome indicators and also serve as an evidence framework for measuring impact among our impact focus groups. Using the TaRL assessment tool, a standardized paper-based and one-to-one oral testing tool for measuring literacy and numeracy level for children, our biweekly assessment aims at measuring specific indicators including 

1. Iincrease in the number of  students who can perform simple one and two digits mathematical operation including addition, subtraction 
2. Increase in the population of student who can read or write a story in Hausa or English

3. Proportion of children aged 5-14 years at the end of primary education achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in (i)reading and (ii) mathematics

Using an impact framework, a rapid assessment of 1500 beneficiaries in March 2021 showed that there has been a 77% increase in the proportion of children able to read a 4-line paragraph in Hausa, a 72% increase in reading letters, 78% increase in reading paragraphs and 86% increase in proficiency in subtraction. As we plan to scale our solution across different contexts, we plan to adopt other measuring techniques such as Randomized Control Trials to further authenticate the reliability of our solution and provide a conceptual framework of evidence-based intervention that can address the learning crisis at scale.  

FastTrack builds on the long standing evidence of Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) methodology and accelerated education model to promote literacy and numeracy skills development for children across India, Kenya, Botswana and Nigeria. Hence, our theory of change is conceived on the notion that if children are taught with age appropriate curriculum, with a mother tongue as the language of instruction, they can develop basic numeracy and literacy skills competency both in their mother tongue and a second language, usually English. By design, our solution helps out-of-school children to develop functional and basic foundational skills sufficient to develop as independent learners capable of engaging in personalized lifelong learning activities.

Through a series of independent but interrelated activities such as baseline literacy and numeracy skill assessment, learning level cluster grouping, teaching and learning as well continuous monitoring and evaluation, FastTrack has been tested and validated to deliver basic foundational skills to children 2 times faster than the conventional classroom.  Using standardized literacy and numeracy assessment tools such as Early Grade Reading  Assessment (EGRA), the TaRL Assessment tool as well as research techniques such as Randomized Control Trials, we have continually documented evidence that support our solution. For example, a rapid assessment test conducted for 1500 beneficiaries in March 2021 revealed a 97% increase in the proportion of children able to read a 4-line paragraph in Hausa, a 72% increase in reading letters, 78% increase in reading paragraphs and 86% increase in proficiency in subtraction.

The integration of a self-assisted technology innovation like the Mavis Talking Book and Pen that serve as the core technology that powers our solution further emphasizes the reliability and effectiveness of our solution compared to other learning interventions. Unarguably, our tech enabled solution can revolutionize learning for the most marginalized children and reimagine foundation skills development. 

At scale within conventional educational systems and through alternative learning processes, Fast Track has the potential to transform foundational learning at the basic level by supporting out-of-schoolchildren to mitigate learning gaps and equipping them with basic foundational skills for Literacy and Numeracy.

At the core of FastTrack is the Mavis talking books and pen. The Mavis Pen is a digital pen with audio capabilities that has sufficient memory to store up to one hundred (100) Mavis Book programs in it. When the tip of the Mavis Pen is tapped on the text or pictures on the specially printed Mavis Book, the Mavis Pen plays out the corresponding audio stored in it. Built for the poorest and marginalized communities, the digital pen is portable, has ultra-low power (2.5Watts) and an inbuilt rechargeable battery (400mAh). When fully charged in 1 hour using the simple solar compact kits, the pen can work for up to ten (10) hours of continuous use. 

As an organization, we have a legal and moral obligation to tackle discrimination and promote equality in our practices and operations. We are committed to equality of opportunity, therefore, it is our policy that no service user; former, present or future manager, staff or volunteer, receives less favourable treatment (actual or perceived) on the grounds of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, maternity and pregnancy, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. Our commitment is expanded to ensure that an individual who is associated with or perceptually associated with an individual with a protected characteristic is protected. We ensure that no individual is subject to less favourable treatment and any  individual that feels they are subject to discrimination has the right under our inclusion policy to seek redress through appropriate policies whether that be a formal complaint or a grievance. We also ensure that people from underrepresented groups will benefit from our programmes and other opportunities and wherever possible, relevant training will be provided to prepare them to produce maximum impact on the programme.

AREAi's values also align well with MIT Solve. We puts the children we serve first. We listen to them and their families or guardians, and we take their feedback as seriously as that of any member of our team. As we keep the voices of beneficiaries at the centre of our work, we take conscious and intential decisions daily in order to follow this principle.  

As a team, we have proactively created policies for prevention of sexual harassment, and also have mandates for both paternity and maternity  absence-from-work policies. It is key to note that the paternity leave policy is based on our  organisation's choice to ensure equal work and home environments.

Our business model builds on a reliable partnership between IDP camps, development organizations, donor organizations, local CSOs and NGOs as well as government MDAs at the local, state and national level. Using a value for money analysis and return on investment per child which is measured by the expected outcome of our program, this model enables our partners to either fund unit cost of our program implementation or give in-kind support to aid overall delivery of our solution. Using our resource mobilization strategy, we leverage this multilevel partnership to mobilize the key resources needed for our solution to work including data for decision making, established relationships with IDP camp leaders, a sustainable revenue stream and a dedicated team. We provide the technical, theoretical and functional support that is required to deliver our solution while our partners including the communities where we work and donors provide human or financial resources needed for implementation. Although not operational yet, one of scale strategies is adopting the franchising business model. This would enable us to achieve widespread adoption of our solution as well as a multiplier effect of impact across different contexts. Since 2019 till date, we have had over 10 partners including individuals and corporate organizations sponsor the enrolment of over 3,500 children. 

To become financially sustainable and raise funds that will support our work, we integrated a funding diversification strategy into our programme management process. Over the next  five years, we plan to sustain our solution through different revenue streams including innovation awards, large scale grants from bilateral and multilateral organizations, partnership with the government at the local and national level as well as online fundraising. For example, we have an ongoing fundraising campaign of 10 Million Naira to support 1,000 children. This target covers the program, administrative and logistics costs of FastTRACK for the next 18 months. In addition, we have secured the commitments of local philanthropists to contribute a total of 4 Million Naira towards the delivery of our innovation over the next 6 months. The selection of FastTrack as one of TheirWorld’s first ever Innovation in Education Award is a pointer that we are better positioned to win innovation-in-education awards such as MIT Solve and WISE awards that both come with financial support. Unarguably, we have clearly identified clear cut strategies to continue to generate revenue to support our work. 

It is worthy of note that between our establishment in 2014 and December
2021, we raised over £1,700,000 in monetary grants, cash donations and
in-kind support from notable local and international development
institutions including the United Kingdom Foreign Commonwealth and
Development Office, One Young World, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
Queens Commonwealth Trust, Zurich Foundation, Global Changemakers,
Zurich Foundation, Zenith Bank and the Global Youth Mobilization among
others.

Notably, In 2021, FastTrack was selected as one of the 5 winners of TheirWord first ever Innovation in Education Awards out of over 100 applications globally. Through this award, we received a £50,000  ready to scale grant to scale the impact of our solution across 4 camps to reach 2,500 children. We also received received 1000 Swiss Francs from Global Changemakers Switzerland to pilot FastTrack in a refugee camp with potential for scale after extensive impact evaluation. We are currently exploring scale up grants through the USAID's Development Innovation Ventures and UKAID's Global Innovation Fund.

Unarguably, our approach to scaling social innovation has proven that we are capable of leveraging funding partnerships and multi-level grant support to sustain our numerous evidence-based interventions including the FastTrack solution. Most significantly, over the next 8 years, we plan to partner with the State Agencies for Mass Education across different states in Nigeria, particularly those that are worst hit with educational disruption due to conflict and humanitarian emergencies. Through this partnership, we plan to train principal education officials and strengthen the states' technical capacities in facilitating and delivering our innovation on a large scale, which requires less financial investment from our organisation.