The Bright Box

Simbi Foundation is working to solve a problem that cannot be solved by us alone; but we want to do our part. The legacy of colonialism and racism in Africa has left a crippling lack of resources to support those who fall through what tenuous social safety net exists, while propagating unjust political structures, corruption, and ethnic conflicts that lead to weak or failing states, civil war, and hunger, leading to mass displacement over the last century.

In Uganda, the home of 1.8 million refugees, we have seen the lack of opportunities available to young people living in refugee settlements, mostly displaced from  South Sudan, Congo, Burundi, and Somalia, These are some of the world’s most underprivileged learners, as schools in large refugee settlements, like Bidibidi, Nakavale, and Palorinya,  are simply overwhelmed. Digital learning is scarce or non-existent, and schools struggle with electricity and internet access. The resource deficit is so great that eight students, in Bidibidi Primary schools, struggle to share one textbook.

Despite the valiant efforts of the UNHCR, and the other charities working in the settlement, local schools simply do not have anywhere close to the resources needed to provide a quality, effective, and curiosity-provoking education. Students in settlement schools see low examination pass rates and graduation rates, as compared to Ugandan nationals. Eventual employment is also a challenge, as only 29% of refugees to Uganda end up employed, a full 35 percentage points less likely than a Ugandan national to have a job.

What we can do to help is to provide digital enabled, solar-powered, resource-rich learning solutions that have been designed based on research and community needs. We have started by providing these resources in targeted locations where people are most vulnerable, and, with the support of MIT, we hope we can expand further and deliver even more impact from our BrightBox solar-powered classroom.

Simbi Foundation's BrightBox is a classroom and solar charging center. Installed on the grounds of existing school sites, the BrightBox generates clean energy to power a suite of education technology found inside it, supporting teacher and student outcomes with laptops, tablets, projects, headphones, software, and supplementary digital aids. The power of the BrightBox is not just limited to the technology inside it, though, and is also capable of powering lighting and projectors in ten surrounding classroom blocks, enabling learning to happen for longer, and for more students at any given period. 

As well as sharing power, the BrightBox also distributes learning resources. The classroom creates a 2km-range intranet, which hosts supplementary, offline digital learning resources via a platform called Simbi Learn Cloud, which is the heart of the BrightBox solution. BrightBoxes can seat up to 40 students, but the intranet allows dozens more students to access learning materials.

Simbi Learn Cloud is a unique, custom-built, offline digital library of learning materials curated by Simbi Foundation. In recognition of the close ties between provision of educational materials and neocolonialism, the materials on Simbi Learn Cloud are purely supplementary for teachers in our partner communities who are delivering the Ugandan National Curriculum. 

In addition to unique features to assist teachers, who are usually deprived of any kind of functional digital resources, we include on the Learn Cloud a wide range of resources - both from international sources like Wikipedia and Khan Academy, to more localized materials from African Storybook Project and official textbook material from National Curriculum Development Center of Uganda. The ultimate aim of Simbi Learn Cloud is to provide access to learning resources that are easily and freely available to anyone privileged with internet connection.

Housed in Simbi Learn Cloud is a unique reading software called Simbi. Initially developed in consultation with Eastern Ugandan communities by researchers in Simbi Foundation’s Think Tank, Simbi uses a “reading-while-listening” method to boost students' literacy. Students can select a short e-book they would like to read, and can then select the narrator and accent (provided by online readers around the globe) they would like to listen to as they read. In randomized controlled trials, Simbi’s immersive reading method has proven to boost student reading fluency twofold, and provide a comprehension boost of up to 80%.

The access to power provided by BrightBox classrooms expands the impact further, as other organizations working locally in Bidibidi can utilize the BrightBox's energy capacity to power their own initiatives. Currently, CRADLE, an NGO from Kings College London, uses one of our BrightBoxes to allow local health teams to charge their innovative Vital Signs Alert devices,which have proven to save maternal lives, expanding the reach of the teams and their ability to use the devices. 

The possibilities for further expansion of this model are endless, and the benefit can be multiplied across the entire settlement. In addition, at the grassroots, local people can use BrightBoxes to charge their own devices, for a small fee, which goes into keeping the BrightBox sustainable when it is turned over to full community ownership in five years. 

30 million people across Africa are estimated to have been displaced by armed conflict in 2021, with an estimated 1.5 million living in Uganda alone. While this number includes thousands of individuals and families living in private homes and residences, hundreds of thousands more live in sprawling refugee settlements, mostly under the auspices of the UNHCR. Of these, over 246,000 people call Bidibidi home, including some 140,000 school age children.

Most people in Bidibidi were forced to flee their homes, with and many having to ldue to armed violence, the threat of starvation, and severe deprivation.  Youth, who are split roughly evenly between girls and boys, have sometimes arrived in Bidibidi without parents or other relatives, and face linguistic and cultural barriers, especially learning in English, which is the primary language of the Ugandan State and National Curriculum. While an average Canadian school has an average student-to-teacher ratio of 17.4 to 1, Bidibidi schools can see ratios of 90 to 1, or even 100 to 1. 

Students and teachers are also affected by factors within Bidibidi that make quality learning and teaching even more out of reach, such as lack of safe and reliable access to power. This disadvantages students in refugee settlements even more, as it makes access to any kind of digital learning impossible. 

Imagine the experience: students sometimes come from miles away to attend class, facing heat exhaustion and dehydration on the walk to school. Then, when they arrive, they face learning in a classroom with no power, no textbooks, a curriculum in  an often foreign language (English is the official language of the Ugandan curriculum) a lack of food and clean water during class, all while competing with dozens of other students for the attention of a very small group of teachers, all who can provide little in the way of tools to support their teaching and virtually nothing for feedback.

While a situation with this much scarcity cannot be remedied by any one organization,Simbi Foundation believes that the BrightBox and its versatility can go a long way toward improving learning experiences for students. 

The combination of solar power, teacher resources, special software, clean water provision, and a bike share to help children get to school, goes a long way to bridging the resource gap and providing better learning results for refugees. Underscoring this point are the words of the US Ambassador to Uganda, Debra Malic:

“Providing energy in refugee settlements, coupled with connectivity and digital tools, will improve the resilience of refugees and their host communities, and move them towards self-reliance”

We are doing exactly that, and we plan to continue doing it.

When Simbi Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), it was a huge vote of confidence that not only did our solution have the potential to help some of the world's most disadvantaged people, but also that they felt it would be accepted by the community. Since then, both from our organizational headquarters in Vancouver, and with our local team in Uganda, we have worked side-by-side with civil society organizations deeply embedded in Bidibidi, such as Finn Church Aid, Windle International, and the UNHCR itself. This commitment to partnership has greenlit our way to working directly with settlement schools and school leadership.

Our direct approach to working with the community is through our Think Tank. This team of academics work with Simbi Foundation to test, validate, and support our programs through rigorous research academic guidance. As our entire approach is research-based, which means that we use research methods and tools to meaningfully engage with the community at the grassroots level to collect their insights, learn from them, and assess needs before  taking action. The cycle begins at the community level: an issue is identified from or by the community or a partner, background research and literature consultation takes place, research material is prepared by Think Tank researchers, the team then conducts the activity in collaboration with communities, results and data are analyzed, and then decisions are made based on the data.

There are currently 35+ voluntary Think Tank members from universities across North America (UBC, U of T, Queens, McMaster, Vanderbilt, etc. etc.) with the majority upper-year undergraduate and graduate students. As part of our TRIPs, which are  Simbi Foundation-led research expeditions to Uganda the team works to collect data from the community in the form of focus groups, surveys, pre-post tests surveys, KIIs, questionnaires, feedback form, post-installation follow-ups, and RCTs. Think Tank volunteers also can use the data collected to publish papers and advance academic literature and solutions to educational problems.

Simbi Foundation is a research-driven NGO, which means that we work primarily with academics to design and guide our programming. Our dedicated Think Tank team of volunteers is always looking for other academic organizations to partner with in order to improve the quality, quantity, and accuracy of the research that underpins our program.

We are applying for an award from MIT Solve for an opportunity to work with other research-led organizations who are experts in monitoring, evaluating, and maximizing the capacity of existing organizations. As we move to scale, we want to check our own blind spots and biases to make sure that, at every stage of the journey, we are conducting meaningful impact studies, needs assessments, and gender analyses.

With coaching, support, and the kind of partnerships we could make as part of MIT Solve, we anticipate conducting a full-scale evaluation of our program, hopefully by working with partners already deeply involved in Bidibidi or UNHCR refugee settlements. We would also welcome partnerships with Ugandan or more broadly, East African universities, pan-African Think Tanks, or MIT itself.

Additionally, as we are a smaller organization, investing in research solely to understand best practices and strategies for raising funds can be a challenge. We would be interested in working with other organizations to strengthen our fundraising know-how and overall capacity.

Various innovations address different parts of the challenge of keeping refugee students in school, but the advantage of the BrightBox is that it contains various innovations in one physical space. More than just classroom space, computers, and the solar power needed to charge them, the BrightBox provides access to an entire digital world via Simbi Learn Cloud, without the need for a stable internet connection.

The BrightBox is also an impact multiplier. As it functions as a power source, the BrightBox provides value to anyone who needs to charge anything, something that can be difficult or stressful in Bidibidi, where large parts do not have access to power, at least not reliably. While the BrightBox delivers impact on its own, through the teaching resources and access to Simbi Learn Cloud, it also helps other local organizations bring digital, powered, technology to their own solutions, as well as just helping local people stay more reliably connected with family and friends, some of who have been left behind.

While other organizations (Arrow, Samsung) also produce solar-powered classrooms, they are far more expensive ($100,000 USD each) than BrightBox ($38,000 USD each), and are often not placed within the vicinity of an existing school, limiting the number of students they can empower. While the Aleutia solar classroom ($20,000 USD) is cheaper than the BrightBox, it is also not implemented within the vicinity of an existing school, restricting its possible impact. 

As children deserve clean, sustainable water at school, our 5000-liter water catchment system also provides water for the school community to use. The ISSB method uses brick made by Hydro Concepts in Kampala, which are formulated from a simple mixture of subsoil, water and additives that are then cured in the sun. This process eliminates hefty transportation and construction costs, and damaging deforestation practices. 

Additionally, the interlocking method uses only five to ten percent of the cement needed to lay the bricks. We implemented this technology not only to provide clean water for the school, as an upgrade to our old and less sustainable plastic tanks.

Simbi Foundation currently has three BrightBox classrooms installed in Bidibidi, one in Putti Village, Uganda, and one in Uttarakhand, India. In addition, we have provided 16 BrightBox Micros across Uganda and India, which are suitcase-sized kits containing tablets, projectors, and all of the educational content that comes with the BrightBox, including Simbi. Two BrightBoxes have just been installed in Bidibidi settlement, thanks to generous funding from the Gupta Family Foundation and the Global Prosperity Initiative. Their funding will see an additional two BrightBoxes in Bidibidi later this year.

Our pathway to scale continues as we move past the pandemic and toward new beginnings, opportunities, and challenges. Over the next ten years, we plan to install 210 BrightBoxes, reaching 3.5 million refugee learners. Much of this growth will take place over the last five years of the program, as the BrightBox proves itself as an innovation and becomes recognized as a best practice for education provision in remote and refugee settlements. Our initial goal, over the first five years of our agreement with the UNHCR, is to provide an additional 6 BrightBoxes in Bidibidi, which would serve as many of the settlement’s 140,000 school age children as possible. 

We are working closely with our partners as we move to scale, including the UNHCR, Finn Church Aid, Windle International, and the Ugandan Ministry of Education. Over the next four to five years, we plan to increase the level of BrightBox saturation within Bidibidi, as well as in neighboring settlements such as Nakivale and Palorinya. Looking further than Uganda, we also plan to expand our offer of BrightBoxes in remote India, where we have already installed one solar-powered BrightBox classroom and several Micro learning kits to several remote primary schools. 

Our scaling depends on continued evidence of literacy improvement. Conducting further RCTs will help us move forward with a rock solid base of evidence to help us quantify our impact and continue to find supporters to help bring BrightBoxes to even more communities.

Our affiliated Think Tank of academics are responsible for working with our partner communities and logistical partners to measure and evaluate the success, progress, and need for improvement of all aspects of our BrightBox program. In additional to multiple other pre- and post-installation surveys and questionnaires, key current monitoring and evaluation processes are focused on the following:

Literacy Progression

To further our understanding of BrightBox literacy benefits, the Think Tank is currently developing a multivariate randomized control trial to measure literacy progression among students using Simbi’s “Reading-while-listening” approach in the BrightBox as opposed to simply silent learning. Another aspect of the study looks at reading-while-listening when they are listening to a culturally relevant accent (South Sudanese, Congolese, etc) as opposed to a Canadian or American accent. 

This overall 3-month study has three groups: two treatment groups will be  reading-while-listening for 10 minutes a day on Simbi (one in a Canadian accent, one in a South Sudanese accent) and a control group will be silently reading. Literacy progression will be measured based on words read correctly per minute reading and scores in comprehension quizzes.

Pass Rates, Attendance, and Exam Results

We are also in the process of collecting and examining historical and post-installation attendance and attainment data from our partner schools, especially looking at exam results from Primary 4 and Primary 7 students.  Students in Primary 7 must pass the Primary Leaving Examination (PLE) to transition to secondary school in Uganda. With low transition rates in refugee settlements, this is therefore a key indicator to track as we continue to install BrightBoxes.

This same evidence will be used to examine attendance and passing rates for girls, to better understand the differential impacts and challenges faced by girls in the education system available to them in refugee settlements, and how their performance varies year-to-year as opposed to boys.

Teacher Technology Training Retention

The Think Tank is providing surveys to teachers engaged in our technology training programs about their self-reported levels of understanding of the technology they have been given,) as well as continuing to better understand if the teacher training program needs improvement.

Solar Energy Usage

The new design of the BrightBox will connect the classrooms to a virtual dashboard that will allow the team to monitor how much solar is being generated, how much is being used, and how much is stored in the battery system. This will continue to help us understand the BrightBox’s solar performance and durability.

Our theory of change starts from the idea that an ideal world is one in which access to education is universal, and resources are evenly distributed, allowing equal access to the global job and entrepreneurship market. This is a world in which everyone has the same opportunity to reach their goals and strive for self actualization, the pinnacle of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. 

However, for much of the world, these goals cannot even be strived for. The world looks much different. Decades of colonialism, neoliberalism, racism, unfair extraction of natural resources, and criminalization of poverty have left a vast majority of the world´s citizens with progressively lower and lower limits of possibility. Depending on random factors such as skin color and place of birth, even goals such as a place to live, work that can support oneself, and well-being into old age are becoming unrealistic. 

These barriers are beginning to harden even in the developed world, denying many the opportunities for self actualization that they thought they would be entitled to.In the developing world, however, especially in highly disadvantaged situations such as refugee settlements, these barriers are calcified and deeply ingrained. For many of the world´s most disadvantaged, such as refugees, access to clean water, sufficient nutrition, physical security, and finding work prevent any kind of dignified or autonomous life.

Self reliance and self determination, which are the first stepping stones on the path toward self-actualization, should be at least the primary goals for those who have seen their lives upended, often ending up as wards of a under resourced and over stretched refugee system, stripped of much of their ability to determine the course of their own lives. 

While self-reliance is difficult to achieve for many refugees in Uganda, it should not be impossible with the right support, and educational opportunities, to build a life of dignity and sufficiency no matter what the circumstances. 

Moving toward this ultimate goal, our theory of change proceeds:

Ultimate Outcome: An increase in the number of refugee men and women who are self reliant

To achieve this ultimate outcome, we believe our BrightBox implementation will support the provision of a quality education in refugee and remote populations, achieving the following intermediate outcome.

1. Increased educational attainment by highly disadvantaged learners. Education is a crucial building block for employability, job skills, social contact, lead to the ability to live a dignified and determined life.

We believe our BrightBox provides the following outputs to support education

1. Lighting and electricity

2. Digital resource access 

3. Provision of special software

4. Transportation to school, through the bike share program

5. Clean water, at least during the rainy seasons

There are various risks associated with the project, which we have identified and taken steps to mitigate. Some of the most pressing are:

1. That our digital curriculum approach may be viewed as imposing or colonial, and therefore damage the reception of the intervention in Uganda. We have mitigated this risk by designing our curriculum programs to conform within the standards of the national Ugandan curriculum, and through our partnership with Windle International, who ensure that this alignment between Simbi Foundation curriculum and Ugandan curriculum is monitored and continually updated. As well, the Ugandan Ministy of Education Development Centre will conduct an audit of Simbi Learn Cloud and make sure it aligns with their curriculum

2. That BrightBoxes are viewed as too expensive by the community and phased out over time. However, we do not believe that the ongoing expenses of the BrightBox will be beyond the capacity of the community to pay for with the solar charging revenue. We have secured ongoing relationships with an Ugandan Contractor (Village Energy) who will repair the solar panels for the community if needed.

3. That the software included on BrightBox computes does not deliver the results anticipated. This concern is mitigated by the work the Think Thank does on researching the results of all programing, especially digital software, to make sure that it continually meets the needs of the community.

The core technologies used in the Simi Foundation’s BrightBoxes are the same technologies that are used in classrooms in high income countries—computers, headphones, projectors, and wifi. We combine these with digital resources that we believe all children should have access to in order to have an integrated and holistic learning experience, as well as provide students who need literacy help with access to Simbi and its innovative design that stimulates both listening and reading skills at the same time, activating more parts of the brain and building strong connections in a young learner’s mind.

However, this is just a description of the components. The real technology that empowers all of this is the oldest and most ancestral form of power in existence — the sun. By lining the BrightBox roof with solar panels, and placing the shipping container classroom in areas with near-constant sunshine, we make accessing all of these components possible, even in areas with unstable or non-existent electrical coverage.

When both the classroom, and all surrounding classrooms, have access to power while reducing the risk of brownouts, blackouts, or surges, the impact of the BrightBoxes can be enhanced as more technology can easily be loaded onto the students computers. In this way, BrightBox's technology is flexible and can grow based on the needs of students, as determined by our research and the expressed desires of teachers, settlement workers, and the UNHCR.

Simbi Foundation is dedicated to diversity, equity, intersectionality, and equal access to education and rights. We feel that these are not just buzzwords but building blocks for a strong, resilient, and inclusive 21st century organization to thrive and deliver real positive change.

We begin by ensuring that people from the countries in which we work are reflected not just in advisory and assistance roles, but that they play key leadership roles in our team. We do not believe in tokenism or figurehead positions, therefore we delegate control of each geographic team to the local head, so they can manage and assign tasks to others from the team they see fit.

Our team in Vancouver is also gender-inclusive and diverse, with leadership, team members, volunteers, and Think Tank members representing a balance of lived experiences, points of view, and levels of experience. 

To support gender inclusion in our BrightBox programming and to make decisions that support women and girls in our partner communities - who face additional barriers of access to education - Simbi Foundation is currently conducting a gender-based analysis (GBA) with a provisional report concluded in 2021. This document has, and will continue to, shape our programming moving forward.

Simbi Foundation relies on a dynamic mixed revenue model, with income from grant funding, corporate donations, individual donations (including those gathered through events, such as race teams) and earned income. So far, this model has been successful, and has allowed us to continue our work while paying our staff and building a surplus to spend on organizational needs.

We use a model common to most non-profit organizations in order to stay sustainable, but we see our main output being not in dollars raised, but in impact delivered. A dollar flowing into the foundation that does not flow out either directly or indirectly into a service provided is not the principal unit of currency at Simbi Foundation. We much prefer to see funds raised that can then be paired with an equivilant dollar amount of impact created in the communties where we work.

In terms of the sustainability of our work, Simbi Foundation pursues an innovative five year stategy for every BrightBox we build at each school. As smartphone penetration reaches even into the Bidibidi settlement, we ensure that displaced people, as well as those from local communities, have a power source (the BrightBox) to charge their devices, keeping them in touch with family and friends while displaced. We charge a very small fee for this charging, where the money goes directly to the school commitee managing the BrightBox. At the end of five years, the school takes over full ownership of the BrightBox, and all money earned, and that continues to be earned, goes to defray their costs associated with ongoing repairs and training. In this way, we are proud to say that the BrightBox is financially sustainabile, and will not become yet another broken down innovation that failed to help African people over the long term.

Simbi Foundation has been recognized by numerous institutional funders large and small, and there are too many to list here. However, we will point to some of the largest backers who believe in our work and have kept the organizational on track financialy to deliver the impact we know we can deliver.

Grant Funders:

Royal Bank of Canada

Telus

The Gupta Family Foundation

The Betty Averbach Foundation

Trinity Jubilee Foundation

Awards:

Mohammed Bin Rashid Global Prosperity Initiative winner

ReImagine Education awards finalist