EDUCATION FOR TRANSFORMATION AFRICA

in Education for Transformation we want to give a model what education for young children can look like,an education which is child centered. 0-6 years are not really years for academics but a time to develop the whole person, develop the child's value system,character,attitude,mindset where the whole outlook to life, develop the personality,learning concepts,identity,learning to relating with others. we offer a holistic approach where children learn by doing and sensorial learning. we also train teachers and parents as community inclusion towards building an all round learning environment for children. we build regional model pre-schools and training centers where different people learn from and replicate what we are doing in there different fields of dealing with children.In addition to pre-schools we are developing online tutorials to reach many people through social media and online video platforms since majority have access to smartphones in order to utilize the digital opportunity.

in Africa the rude methods of teaching are used in school from day one of school which involve repeat after me memorize and cram. Day one in school starts with alphabet cramming for the little one which biases learning for the little ones . we believe that the early years are the foundational years for life where but academics. But since education in Africa has become a business, its now result oriented rather than learning. 

The pre-school age is the very time in life when children want to do.

If this urge is suppressed and children are forced to be quiet and sit still and listen, this drive is quenched.

Consequence we’ll later in vain at young adults for autonomy and the interest in working manually, the confidence in the ability to do things, and a determination to keep trying—but it won’t be there. This must be developed and encouraged early.

So at Edu4Trans, we try to look for ways to engage children in practical work projects,-and they love it.

we are serving the local communities children, teachers,care takers in both urban and rural areas in Africa in collaboration with government agencies and institution. we are currently located in Ghana,Burundi,Rwanda And Uganda.Our desire is to serve at least 60% of African countries in the next 15 years. 

 Education for Transformation (Edu4Trans) is an initiative to create societal transformation specifically within sub-Saharan Africa through the vehicle of early childhood education. It seeks to provide teachers, caregivers and children an alternative to existing early childhood development approaches. Africa has tried traditional methods long enough with the same results. It is time education provide children with a firm foundation upon which to build and in some cases re-build their lives and societies. What better stage to do this than during infancy?

To do this a good understanding of what children need at different stages in their development journey is critical.

For instance, between 3 to 6 years, children become over-adaptive and much care is needed in training them. At this stage a child begins to understand who s/he is. In particular, a gender identity starts emerging. The system of family, and the child’s social role in it, is discovered at this age. Role-play becomes one of the most favorite activities. Playing becomes an important strategy to reduce anxiety, to learn social rules and practice effective behavior. Though a child learns about social contract in the previous stage, now the child needs to learn more about its application and practice how to function in the social contract.

Also during this stage, the main question for the child is ”WHY?” They want to know why things are.

For parents and educators, it is very important to help them to get accurate information and interpretation. This requires taking time to talk with the child and find out what he has discovered and what he has understood.

Our curriculum is designed in such a way as to give any child the best environment, information and tools available to enable healthy holistic development. we are to create an app which we can use to reach many people utilizing the the dot com opportunity which is the most effective to reach millions in a short time with online tutorials hence scaling up impact. we are to use to introduce on consultancy platforms on both the website and the app to reach many at a low cost. we are also to buy computers to help in teaching IT to teachers during our training

in addition to our model pre-schools and training centers which are child centered we are also using the dot com space to reach out many people through online tutorials on both the website and the yet to come app. This will enable those that can access our model pre-schools to learn and replicate our model with just a data investment instead of the many expenses that are involved in the physical learning. We are also introducing an online consultancy platform where those with inquiries can be helped with a very short time.

we also use locally available materials for making learning materials which makes it easy for rural communities to adopt the teaching model we are introducing.

we run a website which we use to reach out to different people around the world to create awareness of the work of the organisation. we use electric digital tools for material making liking embroiders,electric gig saws etc for the learning material making which makes work easy,quick and smart. we also use computers for general administrative work and teaching like accounts management in addition to hand held smart phones.

our solution has been tested for over ten years and it works effectively.

children taught sounds of letters and they can read and spell any word with no need to cram words but just understanding the concepts of reading and writing. many schools have given positive feedback about how children from our model schools find reading and witting words easy.

many schools are signing up for there teachers to be trained and change there class room settings to our model standards in many regions of our countries of operation.

therefore we expect our solution to address the problem because its inclusive and the communities in are our areas of operation are hungry for it. 

we are currently serving a population of 400,000 people in total of all the people we have served from the start. we are to serve an more 30,000 when we open a new center in northern Uganda next year and hoping to serve an extra 70,000 in Kenya and Tanzania by the end of the next 5 years. these numbers may exceed other factors remaining constant.

given we have funds, our goal is to work with the people we have trained from different countries to open up more centers across Africa and through collaboration with ministries of Education like we did in Ghana we want to open up model pre-school but also work already established schools to setup pre-school sections that operate on our model in those schools. Already established schools only need a few changes making it cheaper to adopt our pre-school model. through these patternships we are hoping to reach out to at least 20 million children across East,Central and Western Africa in the next 5 years. Since governments have the biggest number of schools we are looking these the major collaborators in our quest to transform early childhood education.

our current barriers has been collaborating with governments and getting them to trust the model. the other barrier has been the financial resources where we could not afford to run our programs as planned and limited on vision skilled labour force. Most parents also find it difficult to trust our pre-schools at first time before gaining traction since our teaching methods are new. We have always connected with governments through ministries of Education so that they can adopt our curriculum in national schools curriculum which has always been a challenge where most government officials want us to pay large sums of money (corruption) before forwarding the case to government for implementation.

Through our community outreach to the different community members through workshops the communities have been able to embrase our model. Through collabolation with government officials we have been able to get connected to government systems and them embrasing our model and intergrating it in the national curriculum. in uganda we are now affiliated with Makerere University through which we are connected to many schools and students in the earlychildhood programmes.

we are also sourcing grant funding like the MIT SOLVE .

we have a team of 50 people full time spread across Africa and a team of over 1000 part time .These are mainly former students and collaborators who are always called upon whenever we running an outreach project in the different regions of the world. Our team also include part time volunteers from around the world who come in to give hand in many activities like construction and learning material making.

We  are confident of our team not just because they are vision oriented, but our founder Claudia Bohner was trained in Germany to become a teacher in special needs education for children with learning difficulties and behavior problems. The board has lawyers, former ministers of Education,teachers and many other categories to mention but a few. all our 50 team members have undergone 3 years of intensive of Education For Transformation training to equip them with the best skills to push the vision forward in addition to there degrees and diplomas. Most of the team are part of the community which enables us to interact with ease.

we in Partnership with a number of organisations which include:

Makerere University College of External Studies ECD Department

Ministry of Education and sports Uganda

Youth With A Mission

Nurturing Uganda

Shyira Anglican  Diocese

government of Ghana through Solomon Apiya

Government of Burundi through Jenini Solo

Kyambogo University

our business model is a business to consumer model where deal directly with our community to deliver our services to them . since part our team are community members we through them we reach the  community directly.

as an NGO we depend mainly in donations and grants so we always looking out for grants and through sharing g with different stake holders to give a. however as an organisation we rising money through the sell of learning materials to the different trained schools and communities and contributions from parents of our model per-schools and the contribution from teachers who come for the training.

Solve platform with many opportunities like human capital and funding. we are applying because we need financial support to be able to reach out many children in Africa with high quality early childhood education . This is also an opportunity for us to share our story to many and let people pattern  with us to create this revolution in education in Africa.

USAID

UNHCR

UNICEF

AU-AFRICAN UNION

JICA

one of the challenges in dealing with infants is control during school time, since we do not want to limit the children there exploring and creative abilities. we are going to use this prize to collaborate tech companies to create a system that alerts teachers and care giver in case a child has a problem or goes to a no go area. this will ensure safety of the children while letting them enjoy there experiences at school.

We are going to use the prize to create an app that we are going to use to send out information about our early childhood programs that people can use at there convenience to access the information. we are also going to use the prize to film tutorials that we will share on YOU-TUBE and other video platforms that people around Africa and world can access and learn. since over 75% of the African women and girls have access to smart phones this will be an effective way to reach many with our work at a less cost. 

one of the challenges in dealing with infants is control during school time, since we do not want to limit the children there exploring and creative abilities. we are going to use this prize to collaborate tech companies to create a system that alerts teachers and care giver in case a child has a problem or goes to a no go area. this will ensure safety of the children while letting them enjoy there experiences at school.