Pendo Education Foundation. (Pendocare).

Imagine Africa becoming a land of equal growth opportunity for all. We envision Africa as a place where education effectively prepares our children for life-long growth, decent livelihood, and positive, community transformation

Our mission is to prepare 3-12-year-old children for life by reducing learning gaps in numeracy and reading and improving their love for learning, critical thinking + problem-solving skills, using our hands-on Pendo Box curriculum and tutoring intervention programs so they can thrive throughout and after school.

Core Values:                                                                

• Quality: We seek to be flexible, agile, and innovative, as we do our best to find and apply the most effective, evidence-driven, skillful, ways to provide a “wow” learning experience for our stakeholders.  We acknowledge and reward quality delivery that results in exceptional and memorable outcomes.

• Work with Wisdom: We work smart and hard. We rely on Christian values and proven successful scientific practices for inspiration, insights, guidance, and courage when accomplishing transformative projects that lead to long-lasting impact and restoration.

• Integrity. We put people before profits. We believe true freedom lies in being true to who we are. We truthfully represent ourselves and build relationships based on trust. We walk the talk and meet our commitments to the best of our abilities, especially when no one is watching.

• Learning. When you prohibit failure, you kill learning and innovation. We are open-minded and maintain curiosity, inquisitiveness, and creativity while transforming the impossible into the achievable.  As lifelong learners, we use a playful and engaging atmosphere to learn and unlearn as we hone creativity and problem-solving skills throughout our service delivery.

Gillian Nabbowa is the organization’s founder, CEO, and operations coordinator.  Gillian has grown Pendocare from an idea into an impactful organization that increases access to affordable quality education for over 1000 families, since 2014. As project leader, researcher, and learning product developer, Gillian will continue to oversee the various critical organization operations, team coordination, and strategic direction of the organization and LEAP project. She will also spearhead the development, distribution, and implementation of the Pendo Learning Box and learning intervention programs, and the continuous collaborative evidence-based research partnership arrangements between the kids, parents, and educators throughout the LEAP project. Her project management, strategic, and leadership skills will play a crucial role in the successful smooth running, and completion of the LEAP project.

The Pendocare team is composed of nine members in total including two active advisory board members. However,  the details shared below are for those members that are likely to make a direct contribution to the LEAP project. 

The advisory board

Sarah Brown is currently a co-founder of MIGHTY ALLY based in South Africa and supports education-based NGOs across Africa and Asia to maximize their impact through branding and communication. 

Besides having a degree in Business Administration (Finance, Accounting, and Marketing) from Aurbun University,  Sarah's tremendous experience as Pendocare’s advisory board member guides our strategic partnerships, vision casting, and communications enhancement. 

Helen Akui is a certified ACCA and CPA senior accountant at Care Uganda (a nonprofit serving vulnerable HIV patients). Her vast experience and role as Pendocare's board member keep our financial records well streamlined.

The operations team

Gillian Nabbowa is the company director, researcher, curriculum developer, PR/communicator, literacy advocate, and project and operations leader, with a diploma in Montessori learning, a degree in Business Administration from Makerere University, and a certificate in Business Management from The University of Texas in Austin. She also has over 8 years of experience in teaching, learning curriculum and instruction designing, teacher mentorship, training, and consulting.  

Gillan has forged strategic partnerships and voluntarily contributed to the drafting and re-adjustments of the country’s education policy and quality standards as an active quality assurance technical board member at the Ugandan National Bureau of Standards. She has also contributed to the readjustment of the National Early Years Learning Framework, a Ugandan preschool curriculum spearheaded by the World Bank, and the Ministry of Education and Sports.  Gillian also speaks at various events advocating for the need to boost learning outcomes, in reading, and numeracy, among young children in and out of school.  

Jean Mary is a seasoned curriculum developer, researcher, and teacher trainer, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Arts with Education and an ongoing Master of Education (Med) in Language and Literature Education) (MELL), Makerere University. She has worked as a full-time primary and secondary teacher and designed teacher training courses for several universities and teacher training institutions since 2010.  Jean Mary’s project management, education research, and curriculum development will be very instrumental during the successful implementation and streamlining of the Pendo Box and intervention programs. As the main tutor training and monitoring, support person, Mary’s roles will also include collecting relevant data, and feedback, and generating reports throughout the LEAP project, to guide our future program streamlining and curriculum development enhancement efforts.

Tutors: 

Christine, Lynn, and Claire will continue to deliver the intervention programs as the main tutors, alongside selected community volunteer helper(s) at the implementation site(s). Each tutor has a degree or advanced certificate in a science-related subject, vast teaching experience, is dual lingual (fluent in two or more local languages) proficient in speaking and reading English, and has used the Pendo box to deliver reading interventions,  by interpreting and translating the teaching guide content into the desired instructional practices with little or minimum support and supervision.

Using sponsored reading interventions to improve reading skills among 5-12-year-old kids so they can eventually boost their overall learning outcomes.

Limited access to affordable additional reading intervention and support for 4-12-year-old learners in and out of school. with high literacy gaps, low confidence, and learning outcomes.

Over the last two decades, millions of previously out-of-school children in sub-Saharan Africa have been enrolled in primary school. However, attendance has yet to improve learning outcomes, because 80% of 8-year-olds in Uganda cannot yet read or comprehend a simple sentence.  That number will keep increasing across Africa if no effective intervention is put in place https://data.unicef.org/topic/education/secondary-education/.

Since our school systems “often offer inflexible instruction that does not fit the needs of most children at a given time”, they are therefore not well designed to address the individual needs of students.   Jacobs Foundation White Paper (2023). Advancing Research on Learning Variability. Research Agenda. Compiled by Tsang JM, Fetz-Fernandes G, and Cubillo A. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.7753301

For example, in Uganda, all primary kids are expected to independently read to learn by the age of six, before they are equipped to learn how to read from their early years.  This has led to large learning gaps as they progress from lower to upper grades that are hard to fix without explicit reading intervention.   Many children desperately need help with reading support beyond what the school system can provide.   

It was estimated that out of the 50M low and middle-income families in Uganda with pre and primary-school-going children, 90 % of them are very frustrated by the learning gaps, poor academic performance, and low confidence among their children.  At least 5 million parents are still figuring out how to solve this problem. With little to no effective options, many are forced to use ineffective informal private tutoring offered by the kids’ older siblings or school teachers, many of whom do not know how to help the struggling children. That’s when we come in.  We focus on laying strong reading foundations by improving reading skills among 5-12-year-old kids from low and middle-income families to reduce learning gaps and boost their overall learning outcomes. Since research has proved that the effects of reading tutoring programs tend to be most robust and relatively more effective among students in earlier grades, from preschool through first grade.

A. We create(d): an explicit and structured reading curriculum composed of 30 progressive reading instructional guides each with 20 explicit lessons in the form of scripts and videos, assessment sheets, and links to other virtual resources, stories, worksheets, books, and, reading games. Each guide addresses specific reading skills, like phonemic awareness, decoding, word segmentation, oral reading, and vocabulary. 

B. We distribute the curriculum in the form of a toolbox called the Pendo Learning Box alongside tutoring service subscriptions: 

High and middle-income parents can directly sign up for supplementary in-person or virtual micro tutoring services for their children using tiered monthly subscriptions.

Through partnership arrangements with middle-low income private schools and NGOs serving underprivileged children, families can also indirectly access similar services through highly discounted or sponsored kids' reading clubs, and community reading intervention reading camps. 

The tutoring: Once a parent signs up for the services, a tutor is provided with The Pendo Box to deliver the tutoring at either our tutoring center, online, or preferred setting weekly. Tutors offer individualized1 hour explicit reading instruction sessions, 1-4 or more times per week for 6-12/36 months. The tutors use the Pendo Box to adapt instruction to meet the learners' needs at their current right level during reading interventions, giving them enough time and various opportunities to hone and boost effective reading skills at their pace.

C.  We monitor and measure; 

On-going assessment of learners’ progress and short-term impact. The instructional guides in the box follow a progressive learning sequence with specific, simple-to-track key indicators and well-defined, measurable reading goals. The suggested step-by-step instructional strategies make it easy for teachers and parents to set realistic expectations, deliver learning, and track the quality and progress of individual learners. 

Quality of the Service Delivery: The tutors are supervised by Gillian or Jean, by regularly visiting learning camps to observe and evaluate their application of the suggested explicit Science of Reading aligned instruction methods during lessons, and the learners’ responses.  The tutors and supervisors also use various oral and formal assessments to collect learners’ progressive data quarterly. The data is then used to guide further programming and kits enhancement, tutors’ skills gap evaluation, mentorship, and refresh training. 

We maintain and improve quality through continuous teacher capacity building and support in the form of ongoing training coaching, evaluation, and mentorship. The tutors are consistently monitored and supported through lesson planning preparations, weekly feedback, and occasional live tutoring observations. They are also provided with one-on-one technical mentorship by the overall program mentor and trainer and other highly experienced peer tutors. Teachers also use the guides in the box to boost their reading and delivery skills. On top of providing in-person support, we avail virtual free open-source teacher resources that are either openly licensed or available to distribute for noncommercial purposes. We continuously gather useful digital learning resources to help educators discover a rich variety of learning materials they can use to enhance service delivery that they may not have known about otherwise.

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PS. The theory of change keeps showing that it is not uploaded, no matter how many times I successfully uploaded it. Here is a link just in case the problem persists. 

 Formative research 

We initially worked alongside 30 teachers in 5 private early childhood centers each having at least a total of 180 pre and primary children as we carried out continuous observations, interaction, and inquiry to find out the educators’ and learners’ major hindrances. We developed the curriculum through the process and then used it to take teachers through various ways of using the environment to facilitate inquiry-based and peer-to-peer learning and discovery while offering real-time support in the form of modeling and coaching, and instructional guidance to boost their instruction capacity.  

We eventually extended service to support over 200 disadvantaged children through community-based partnerships with one church and the Rotary DEAR programs 

The assessments and learning delivery. Tutors first use an open source, free internationally valid, and research-based reading assessment tool like the EGRA alongside Pendocare’s interactive oral assessment games to identify the learner’s letter-sound knowledge, phonological awareness, decoding, comprehension, etc. They then use the results to group the learners into clusters before instruction. Most assessment reports reveal that 99% of learners enrolled in our program start with zero scores in reading foundation skills.  We then help them move from the nonexistent stage (0 or 0-20%) to average (2-3/50-60%) or advanced (4-5/ 70-100%) across the various reading skills within one to three years depending on the learner’s age, learning pace and frequency of the intervention. Students' progress evaluations are also carried out after every session and every three months by the tutors to track and measure the learners’ achieved quality and impact of learning.  The findings are used to create the learners’ progressive reports throughout the intervention program and are also used to provide insightful, timely, and relevant information to make decisions when helping learners to work toward future desired learning outcomes.

Program evaluation. 

We use pre and post-survey evaluations in the form of direct interviews or feedback forms, testimonials, and referrals to capture the school directors, teachers, and parents’ needs, feedback, and service rating before during, and after signing up. On a scale of 1-5, we usually get 4 or 5/5. On the other hand feedback survey responses reveal that boosting the learners’ reading skills through our programs results in positive short and lifelong impact.

 “Learning at school hardly made sense. I could not read or write my name at 7 years, I had low self-esteem, was frustrated, and hated learning”. Trishilla Nabumba is a former village schoolgirl raised by a single, illiterate, blue-collar mother who couldn’t afford decent education services. After securing a private scholarship opportunity and going through our intervention program, Trishilla’s reading skills, confidence, and love for learning improved by 80%. She is currently not only among the top students in her class in her new dream school but she also uses her reading skills to support her illiterate mother at home.

Foundational research 

The curriculum design is inspired and developed based on a number of proven theories of practice like the Science of Reading (SOR),  Montessori, TaRL, etc.

We discovered that:

Having clear and measurable learning outcomes like letter knowledge, phonological awareness, decoding, segmentation, comprehension, etc., are crucial indicators. 

Using valid reading assessors like the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) and EGRA  make the monitoring of learners' gaps, gained progress, and impact in various contexts easier. For example 9/10 of teachers and children usually join our program with no or little letter sound awareness and blending skills. By the end of 4-6 months, they are not only aware of the letter sounds but can blend and read nonsense and real short CV/VC OR CVC words within their immediate environment. 

Since learners have different needs, ways, and speeds of acquiring, processing, and expressing ideas, intentionally using content with familiar contexts alongside explicit and engaging strategies to teach reading over a considerable period can lead to better reading skills and retention among learners. Given that the national curriculum leans towards using general learning outcomes and processes, as a result, many children receive rote whole-group reading instruction at rapid speeds while omitting the development of key reading skills. However, following an engaging, well-sequenced progressive, and frequently updated reading curriculum that meets the learners’ right level gives them enough time and various opportunities to hone practical reading skills at a reasonable pace. We discovered that learners that use rote and balanced literacy methods seem to initially show rapid reading rate progress in comparison to those that start with explicit instruction. It is because they manage to quickly cram familiar simple and complex text in while the other group of children are still honing foundational reading concepts. However when both groups of learners are assessed using valid screeners like the DIBELS or EGRA the rote-based learners score way below grade level across key skills like phonemic awareness, decoding, word segmentation, Nonsense Word, and Oral Reading Fluency, vocabulary and word rate per minute. Over time, the rote-based learners’ reading skill gaps increase as they advance into upper grades, while those with explicit instruction become better readers throughout the school. This also revealed that when used well, the intervention and Pendo box are great tools that can boost reading skills among children 4-5-year-olds before they join primary and also reduce learning gaps among 6-12 years old so they can catch up to their grade level before they finish primary school.  

While the learning gaps problem affects the majority of 3-12-year-old learners in low, middle, and upper-income learning settings, those from very low-income families or under-resourced schools have greater gaps. Sadly, such children have illiterate primary caregivers who have little or no clue that such gaps exist, and even if they did, they can hardly help them. Coming from low-income families also makes it hard for such kids to access affordable reading intervention support. However, having free and low-cost intervention opportunities supports such struggling learners to eventually progress from nonexistent, to beginners, to average to advanced and eventually independently read to learn and do better in all other areas in school and life.

We will use the LEAP program to gain demonstrable evidence that the Pendo learning box and tutoring delivery method can be delivered at multiple locations and still lead to a strong, positive impact.

Since our current services resulted from initially interacting with the end users and then led to the informal use of various formative research disciplines like usability studies; feasibility studies; case studies; user interviews; implementation studies; pre-post or multi-measure research; correlational studies etc, we therefore not only look forward to using the support from this project to help us streamline and transform the positive results from these previous studies to generate data-evidenced reports, but we would also like to extend the formative research and work with different groups of children in a new setting to carry out small implementation studies to find out if we will get similar results. The results we get from this study will be very curial to inform our current business model, value offer iteration, and a valid decision-making point of reference for the organization’s future scaling direction  

It is for these reasons that we would like to strengthen the evidence base of our solution by being able to use data to:

1. Understand the day-to-day variation in children’s ability to learn how to read from various income backgrounds. 

2. Identify the key value drivers, effective quality measurement, and evidence collection strategies that demonstrate that our intervention is causing a much better positive impact among learners, as compared to the less impact amongst those who don’t receive the intervention support or get informal but still ineffective tutoring from less trained staff.

3. Figure out how to implement the solution in different settings and prove that it is equally effective. then we will be able to figure out how to design the solution for scale.

1. How do our reading intervention programs impact learning outcomes for children that vary by age or family income level?  

2. Do children with varying socioeconomic backgrounds also vary in their reading skills profiles? 

3. What are the best practices for implementing the program, and how can these be adapted and scaled to different contexts and settings to ensure the program's sustainability?

We will measure the reading skill variability among learners from different social and economic backgrounds.  We will use the initial learner’s formal and informal assessment data and registration details to gain insight into what leads to varying reading abilities among learners of similar age groups but different socioeconomic backgrounds. We will then have the post-intervention assessment collected data to discover if we still achieve similar positive results to those observed in the previously targeted user groups.

We will identify the key areas of improvement in the overall program design for better results when applied in different settings. We will use the learning delivery and program evaluation processes to gain data-driven feedback and evidence of the effectiveness of the Pendobox alongside the intervention programs when applied in new target user groups (moderately or under-resourced centers). 

We shall develop a data-driven evidence report to support the validity of the curriculum tools and materials and tutoring sessions. We are aware that while the reading curriculum was designed to align with the national curriculum learning outcomes and strong scientific research bases like the science of reading, there is no specific official evidence-based proof to back up the validation of the effectiveness of our Pendobox and tutoring intervention programs. We will be excited to use this opportunity to work with internationally recognized, experienced researchers to help us identify and use solid evidence-based data that not only validates the existing effective practices but also helps us to identify better ways to streamline the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the program.

We will use the actual program implementation to measure the effectiveness of our current program processes and timelines. We will use our interventions in a new target user group to help us collect, analyze, and present data to create an easy-to-use standardized map or documentation showing how we effectively carry out the following activities.  We will also use the evidence to present the identified isolated impact of the product and service in the old and new settings.

The selection of target implementing partners' and learners' subscription process. We will use the registration to collect learners' details, social background, parent consent, and any relevant informal kids’ historical reading data (.5 months)

 Facilitator + tutor support. Hiring and training of tutors (.5 months). Use the lesson planning sessions to:

Train tutors/ facilitators in using the box to understand the desired learning outcomes, concepts, and learning methods before applying them.

Learning tool and intervention effectiveness. (4 months)

Measure the effectiveness of the Pendobox: curriculum tools and materials and tutoring sessions using:

1. Initial learner diagnostic assessments.  Know the students’ reading skills (letter code knowledge, phoneme skills, Nonsense Word fluency, comprehension), through face-to-face informal and formal, and use the learner data profiles to group learners and choose the relevant intervention instruction starting point.
2.  Facilitating reading sessions in the form of intervention and book club sessions.
3. Monitoring: Middle assessment: Learners’ reading progress and tutor follow-up and support
4.  Learners' end assessment (end of term/ month 4)

Program value evaluation/Impact evaluation by the learner, parents, partners, and tutors. (one month)

Reading learners' progress reports compiling and sharing. What are the varying reading gaps, learning paces, and the impact of the SMART intervention programs for boys versus girls, children with and without disabilities, and children of different ages from low-income families?

 Program added value: Gaining learners’ Parents, Tutors, and school partners feedback through surveys and interviews about the change in learners’ reading abilities, and cost-effectiveness: access due to minimum fees(parents), the value of the box materials in reducing delivery costs(schools)

 Reflection: identify program successes: what worked well. Identify risks and constraints, add, keep, and cut for future sustainability.

A final report that details tailor-made research recommendations (guidance, strategies, resources, and/or tools) that inform our approach to strengthening the evidence base of our education solution will help us to answer the following questions:

Short-term outcomes. 

1. How can we use the evidence to highlight the major negative causes of reading skill variability and learning gaps among learners from different social and economic backgrounds to come up with a better program implementation process that minimizes those effects? 

2. How can we use research evidence to validate and strengthen the effectiveness of our program and tool in various settings? If we work with children from under-resourced settings and less support twice a week over 3-six to months, how effective and impactful are our programs to them? 

3. In what ways can we standardize or streamline some product development and implementation processes for better service delivery and quality monitoring purposes? We use the new setting trial to identify any loopholes and streamline the program to suit various learning settings in the short and long term e.g.,  how will changing the way we capture and prepare data from user groups, hire and train the tutors or the facilitators' activities, and the way we deliver learning before, during, and after using the tool help improve our value offering?

4. What is the best capital enterprise fit for the organization? How can we use the evidence to lobby further partnerships and funding that will enable us to extend our offering in moderate and under-resourced learning settings and reach more families and children in need of the interventions?

Long-term outcomes:

1. The ultimate goal is to use the Pendobox and intervention tutoring programs to increase access to low-cost quality reading instruction to at least 200,000 learners every 5 years and also have the solutions become reputable, highly trusted, and recommended affordable reading options among education professionals, and organizations serving low and middle-income learners.

2. Be able to use the data to help us continuously enhance our product market fit and reach our full potential as an organization. e.g., Use data to hone the way we collect, generate, and use evidence to make informed decision-making over time. Or gain insights into what we need to work toward scaling the distribution.

3. We will use the report to help us to answer questions like:

What are the most effective product development enhancement goals and to-scale approaches to consider? 

How can we best decentralize the intervention delivery without losing effectiveness? 

How can we leverage technology to refine our product design and make our offerings suitable for various settings? What aspects should of the program should be left to tutors and what can be standardized or decentralized? Is it more effective to develop and use software and low-tech devices to deliver self-study material for practice by both children and adults in moderately-resourced settings or develop offline engaging tools/games to add to the box as materials for both moderate and low-resourced centers?