Noble Missions

In Nigeria, low-resource schools in rural communities do not have the required number of teachers to teach. Among the existing teachers, most of them are not qualified. Premium Times reported in 2021 that “teachers posted to rural communities in Ekiti State have been found to always refuse their postings, making it difficult to ensure effective education in the areas. Some of the teachers often work their postings back to areas of their choice afterwards, denying rural communities of adequate teachers.” This situation across the country has resulted in a growing learning gap for children in these areas. 

To bridge this gap, we launched a pilot phase of a program called ‘Give a Teach’. Give a Teach program recruits working professionals through a web platform to teach children in low-resource community primary schools as volunteers. These volunteers teach their areas of competence that are missing in the community school. For example, an ICT professional will teach ICT in a school with no ICT teacher. 

First, we sought and received approval from the government to implement the program across all the community schools in one of the local governments in Abuja, Nigeria. But only one community school was chosen to pilot the program. We visited the school to discuss the idea with them and ask for their input. We also did a brief baseline study to ascertain the challenges of the school. Based on the baseline, we discovered the major subject that was missing in the school due to the shortage of teachers. And during the initial engagement, we agreed on the responsibilities of both parties, and the school agreed to provide space, a time in the school's weekly calendar for the teaching and a contact person/supervisor for the program in the school. Periodically, we engaged the school authority to provide updates and share key learnings from the implementation.

Give a Teach’s theory of change states that children in low-resource community schools will have good learning outcomes like their counterparts in better-resourced schools if working professionals volunteer their time and skills to teach the missing subjects in the community schools due to the lack of teachers. The key assumptions in the theory of change are based on a conducive environment for the working professionals to volunteer in the community schools; the missing subjects are relevant now and in the future, and the children are taught as designed.

We developed a web platform to serve as the recruitment portal for the volunteers. On the portal, working professionals would be able to see which schools have been approved for the program and what subjects are missing, including the schedule given for the subjects to be taught. A baseline is established with the potential school of implementation to ascertain the missing gaps and their needs. We work with the school authority to support them and make the school conducive for the volunteers to come in to teach. For the pilot, we developed a training manual for the volunteers and a workbook for the pupils to be used during the classes. After each class, the children are evaluated and interviewed to express what they have learnt in relation to the lesson's objectives.

We track and measure the impact of the ‘Give a Teach' project quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, we record the number of schools we are implementing the program, the number of working professionals recruited, the number of hours they teach weekly, and the number of children being taught. We take attendance of every class, QUalititaovely, the children are assessed after each class to check how much they have learnt. We also conduct brief video interviews with selected children after each class to demonstrate what they have just learnt.

Give a Teach bridges the teachers' gap in Nigeria by recruiting working professionals as volunteer teachers in low-resource community schools.

Give a Teach’s theory of change states that children in low-resource community schools will have good learning outcomes like their counterparts in better-resourced schools if working professionals volunteer their time and skills to teach the missing subjects in the community schools due to the lack of teachers. To increase the impact of the ‘Give A Teach’ program, we would like to know if there are other silent variables to consider while providing volunteer teachers that would improve learning outcomes for children in low-resourced community schools. The potential deliverable we look forward to from the LEAP sprint is a document that highlights in detail all possible variables that could affect negatively and positively our theory of change and how we should explore the positive variables and manage the negative variables to achieve our theory of change. These variables should apply to both the demand and supply sides. Being able to produce such a document through the LEAP project would enable us to redesign the ‘Give A Teach’ program to reach more children in the next five years. It will also help us design a sustainability plan for the program. Beyond the program, the experience will contribute to and improve our overall program/project planning knowledge.