Black or White:Equipping The Nigerian Teachers and Educators

Black or White is a pragmatic and indepth training program for educators and teachers in Nigeria &Sub Saharan Africa.

Black or White is a project that solves the decadence in the Nigeria and Sub Saharan Africa education system of several decades with a focus on equipping the educators and teachers in the primary and secondary schools, and a goal to meet the international education standard. The project is designed in a way to review milestone achievement every half a decade in order to check effectiveness and efficiency. 

Survey has proven that majority of the teachers in this part of the world has taken teaching as an alternative career latching on the huge unemployment problem and unstable policies in the education system. Majority of the public schools are suffering from paucity of sound teachers, and this has made the public schools to be left for the low income parents/guardians to patronize. The poor education system has also given individuals the opportunity to establish several mushroom private primary and secondary schools. The good private schools are very expensive and only the high income earners could patronize them.It is also important to note that the proportion of the high income earners is very infinitesimal.The average income earners patronize the mushroom private schools, and the class of parents/guardians with the low earners forms the largest population.The consequence of all these problems is that a larger chunk of the population are left with no option than to patronize the public and private mushroom schools,which are full of unskilled teachers.There is definitely a great need for the teachers and educators to UNLEARN, LEARN and RELEARN. 

Black or White project gives effective and efficient training engagement for teachers and educators to ensure individual personal assessment in order to diagnose the area of lapses and incompetences so as to know the applicable training module to be administered. These assessment are to be configured on software application and done as a simple self-service during our engagement. The individual teachers will get an automated result of the assessment in their personal email and would be sent to their school email as well. The assessment will include: 1. Big Picture Mindset Assessment 2. Role Model Mindset Assessment 3. Failing Forward Mindset Assessment 4. Self Awareness Assessment 5. Invention/Innovation Mindset Assessment. The training modules to fix these problems include:1. Social & Emotional Learning (SEL)2. Understanding the Psychometric System of Pupils/Students 3. Peak Performance Training for Teachers/ Educators 4. Leadership Training for Teachers/Educators 5. Emotional Quotient Vs Intelligent Quotient Training for Teachers/Educators 6. Reading & Reaserch Challenge Training 

These solutions will positively impact our communities and regions and world at large as education is definitely the bedrock and foundation to any thriving economy. Africa will definitely grow over time and snap out of poverty and mediocrity if education is given priority with the western world education system taken as a yardstick of improvement plan. One of the major ways to change the face of our education system is ensure adequate,relevant and proper trainings are done for the teachers and educators who are the chefs cooking the future of our continent. 

Black or White solution is innovative because the integral part of our training is dependent on technology. Our proposed software application is to ensure we switch completely to app based assessment instead of our current hard copy paper assessment.This app would be designed as a user friendly and easy self-service that would enable teachers and educators to determine their area of incompetences, lapses ,strength and a SWOT analysis to determine what should be focused on per teacher/educator. An automated result of the assessment would be sent to the email of the user as well as the email of the school. 

Technology is undoubtedly an integral part of our solution because we are basically meant to do a personality test and SWOT analysis of every teacher and educator with our software application, which will be a determinant of our training engagement. The training module recommendation of the application via the automated result is very crucial to our solution. 

In the same vein , our Invention and Innovation Mindset Test and Training Module is to propel and challenge the teachers and educators to explore ICT in order to be drivers of invention and innovation in their pupils/students in Nigeria& Sub Saharan Africa. 

Our Goals in 12months: Development and easy running of our software application.To train a minimum of 50trainers who will be responsible for support in driving the vision.To ensure we train a minimum of 2,500 teachers and educators in both primary and Secondary schools, cutting across public and private schools. To create a wildfire awareness and educate the general public of our products and services, both online and offline. To ensure we sporadically grow the attendance at our quarterly capacity building training sessions.To ensure we close a funding or grant deal from any prospective investor, either locally or internationally. 

Our Vision in the next three to five years to impart and impact more lives which includes the following:We would do serious online advert for our webinar trainings which will address the unskilled problems in the Sub Saharan Africa educational system. People would be able to sign on for this training from anywhere in the world. 

We would also ensure we comb our nation by opening branch offices in all six geo-political regions.To ensure collaboration with government agencies that makes educational decisions,and collaboration with international agencies and organizations who are intrested in the development of the Sub Saharan Africa. 

We deploy our trainings by doing free personality test, and employee satisfaction feedback to our prospective clients. This naturally is being charged for,but we make it free in order to sensitize our customers and gain higher negotiation power. This is done by engaging zonal education inspectors and the association of school proprietors/proprietress at local levels to the regional levels. 

Our online webinar trainings would also make it accessible to our targeted communities and prospective clients. This would be easier to sign on for as we would do vigorous digital marketing and awareness to the demography of our prospective clients. 

* Our monthly capacity building training for teachers has an average of 120 participants per session.

* We are currently consulting for about 26 private schools, which consists of both primary and secondary schools.

* Total number of staff in the 26 schools we are consulting for is about 390 teachers.

* Total number of pupils and students we currently impact through our pragmatic trainings for teachers is about1,950 pupils/students.

* We have pitched our solution to the Zonal Education Inspector of South-West Region of our Area(Ibadan), and this has been approved to start training over 850 teachers and educators.

To be serving an average of 2,500 teachers in both public and private schools. We currently have an average of 120teachers as participants in our monthly capacity building training for teachers. We believe this is possible because our company has been selected as one of the 2018 grant winners of the Tony Elumelu Foundation,the seed capital of 5,000dollars that would be disbursed a few months would be ejected into execution of this project in order to meet our set targets.We have budgeted to embark on Train the 50Trainers Project which will definitely shoot us to double the figure in 3years.

Our team is a combination of multi-dynamic individuals with indepth knowledge and experience in education, training skills, leadership skills, excellent communication skills and interpersonal relationship skills. We are advocators and practitioners of Emotional Intelligence which is recommended for every walk of life, and very salient for the education sector. 

Our dynamic skills has been demonstrated when we pitched our business idea and solution in Africa and became of the 2018 Entrepreneurs Grant Award Winner of 5,000USD coupled with training and mentoring at the Tony Elumelu Foundation. 

Our revenue generation is basically through the following means:

* Subscription of schools and teachers/educators for our training sessions in their different schools, both online and offline.

* Participation fees for our monthly Human Capacity Building Training for teachers and educators.

* Outsourcing for schools for sound and qualified teachers/educators. 

* Sales of e-books and hard copy books.

* Education consultancy, such as school academic structure review and development strategies. 

Our structure for long term sustainability has made us designed our profit sharing ratio as stated below:

* Profit plugged back into business- 50%

* Profit sharing for shareholders- 20%

* Profit sharing for workers' incentive and motivation-10%

* Profit saved as cash-back against unforeseen risk and future use- 15%

* Profit saved for social responsibilities and community development - 5%

We believe the solve community and platform would give a lifetime opportunity to pitch our solution and business idea to potential or prospective investors who are also seeking opportunities to invest in the development of Nigeria and Sub Saharan Africa, especially in the education sector which is very crucial to the development of every nation. 

We also believe Solve will give us the rare mentoring privilege from industry experts and worldclass professionals as well as profitable networking platform.

One of our major barrier is to get the attention and collaboration of the federal government of Nigeria. This is because the government has not been giving the attention and investment due to the education sector, with less than 10% budget funding to education in the last two decades. 

However, government collaboration and support would definitely be commanded when our solution have international support and backing. Hence, Solve could help us scale this barrier by connecting our solution to international organizations for ICT and Media support.