African Education Technology Centers

With regard to funding in many low-income African countries, PK-12 education technology has regularly taken a back seat to more pressing issues, such as the running of the government, defense, infrastructure and emergency projects such as their COVID response.

Over the past three years, we have taken several trips to different parts of Africa and met with students, teachers, school administrators, and national leaders to learn:

• what already exists in schools, both urban and remote;
• what educational technology would be helpful in African schools;
• the government's vision for educational technology nationwide in order to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals;
• what technology pilots have tried to do already;
• for past pilots, what worked well and what caused the pilot programs to fail.

We found that some technology projects have been done in remote areas, but most of them have been in urban areas and more have failed than were successful in the long run.

Technically, we did find that at least 3G wireless was almost universally available (using a high gain outdoor cell phone booster antenna), but data was not affordable in most places (see chart for more information (https://www.eneighborhood.org/...)

Three of the biggest areas of concern we found were:

1. The high cost of internet data was unaffordable once the project sponsors left and the systems were decommissioned;
2. The equipment deployed in these pilots was either outdated (recycled European or US machines), not capable enough to support the needs of the schools (OLPC for example), or they couldn't survive in the harsh environments very long;
3. Most schools we visited either have no electricity or if they do have electricity, it is not reliable.

Students indicated that, although they appreciate the computers as a vehicle for delivering educational materials, they also wanted to use them to learn computer technologies and how to code.  Old or limited machines either don't support realistic code development or the machines were so old that students can only learn what was current practice 10-15 years ago.  Learning to code in an unrealistic development environment will not allow students to find employment after they graduate.

In summary, we are bringing many of the benefits of education technology to communities who have never had the chance to benefit from it.  Additionally, we are bringing learning resources that will provide instruction in STEM subject areas as well as provide the ability to "catch up" for other groups of adults, who for one reason or another, were not able to attend school when they were younger.

Our project seeks to address many of the mistakes that caused previous education technology implementations to fail and bring long-lasting impact to African communities.

Our implementation design is built around:

• What students, teachers and administrators need - in contrast with what the project sponsors assume they need;
• Optimization of the solution to address the unique challenges found in these communities.

This package will include all that is needed to bring online learning, online libraries and student management to these communities, including hardware and other infrastructure where needed.  More specifically, it will contain: 

Hardware

• 3G/4G networking equipment;
• A sim card with data on it for use during the pilots;
• An internet access antenna (if there are problems with 3G/4G reception there);
• A wi-fi antenna to allow the local network to be seen from entire school campus and, depending on the terrain, the local community;
• A rolling cart for laptops with a built-in charging station or, for smaller communities, we will build a small, community-based tech lab that will be shared by multiple schools and will be available to adults in the evenings;
• 15 laptops for students/teachers;
• A small, battery-powered server - this will use Hyperconvergence technology to allow for expansion (more power and disk space) and will allow more than one operating system to be supported in the same system;
• A DC-only solar energy (no inverters or AC adapters required).

Software

1. Since students in the pilot schools do not currently have unique Student ID numbers, we could use our Ipseity product to create them and manage corresponding Active Directory computer accounts for the students.  As we understand, a national ID project is in-process to assign ID numbers, but school children may not have one assigned before these pilots begin.
2. A Student Information Management cloud-based application will be made available to administrators and teachers at the schools.  This will allow them to enter student information, including student demographics, enrollments, and course registrations.  This information will be stored in a combined database, allowing analysis at the national level.  After student information has been completely entered in, teachers will then have the capability of recording attendance and grades.
3. A library of books will be made available online.
4. A library of learning materials including textbooks, videos, audio recordings and teacher's resource materials.  This will include, for each country, their national curriculum.
5. Software that is designed to help students or adults catch up on missed schooling - this application tests students to find out what they know in reading and mathematics and only teaches them the parts they don't already know.

This solution is designed to serve populations in low income urban and remote communities in Africa.  

It has several design features that specifically address some of the unique challenges in these areas.

In our visits to these locations over the past three years, we spent time in these communities performing extended question and answer sessions with students and staff at schools and in-depth conversations with national leaders (Office of the President, VP, PM, several people at the ministerial level, and with Ministry-level committees) to make sure that what we would provide matches what they need, fits into government long-term plans, and is relevant in the target communities.

The eNeighborhood Project was established out of a desire for the for-profit company Visual Software, Inc. to provide help to low-income African nations with similar products and services as it has provided for wealthy nations, but on a not-for-profit basis.

Visual Software has agreed to provide a unlimited, non-exclusive, source code license to The eNeighborhood Project for use in its African projects.

Core staffing at The eNeighborhood Project comes from the same resource pool as Visual Software.  Therefore, even though The eNeighborhood Project is relatively new, it comes with many years of experience deploying solutions such as these.  

The implementation model we have used has always been to provide training to local staff while the system is being implemented so that they can take over the responsibility of maintaining it once the implementation period is finished.  See: https://www.eneighborhood.org/... for more details.

We have implemented this model in many locations, including Australia (nationwide and state-level implementations), most of the UK and in several US states.  Presently, all of these locations have taken over primary responsibility for maintaining their systems.  We continue to maintain the software, make updates available as needed and provide second-level support to the in-country staff.    

As to local school support, we address this in multiple ways:

• The equipment used is of high quality (military-grade where available) and designed to last many years under normal operating conditions, without requiring professional maintenance.
• Software located at a central location will be used to maintain a detailed inventory of all software running on the school computers.  This software will allow us to push Windows updates to the machines when necessary and to Visual Software applications up to date.
• We use Visual Software's Dexterity(tm) software on laptops and the school server to continually report system health information back to the central monitoring center.  Presently, this provides detailed information about several key health indicators on Windows computers and the ability to monitor other components in the system, such as solar equipment health.

In summary, the software we provide has been heavily influenced by the needs of the communities we will serve, the result of our multiple trips and spending time with African students, teachers, administrators and national-level leaders.

Presently, we have made significant progress in initial research and, through Visual Software, the development of the foundational software we will need to carry out this project.

We have also made arrangements with other suppliers (such as HP, Lenovo, Oracle and Microsoft) for hardware and cloud network services.  We have been negotiating with local organizations in each of the target countries who will help with logistics and will provide local technical support staff who we will train.  We will provide training for their staff and make sure they are equipped to be successful.

Besides funding assistance and advice with larger-scale project funding, we could use assistance with public relations, monitoring and evaluation.  In some of the countries we are working with where we have had contact with national leaders, the government is assigning or has assigned staff to perform the monitoring and evaluation function, but in other places we will need to perform those tasks as part of the project.

Our project is similar to what has been attempted many times in Africa, but has failed in a majority of the attempts, especially from a sustainability point of view.

Some of the ways that this project is different:

• It addresses the issue of the high cost of data.  This is done by
  • re-architecting software to reduce the amount of data needed to perform a given task
  • staging as much information as possible locally at the school and providing a large Wi-Fi zone so that wires are unnecessary in the school and so that community members can access most of the school's resource from their homes without incurring data charges
• It addresses both a lack of IT sophistication in the remote areas (maintenance is mostly managed from a central location) and the difficulties of getting equipment to the location including durability issues, weight of entire system (important when equipment is delivered by helicopter or boat).
• It provides a DC-only solar microgrid designed for hot environments and places where all the powered devices are battery powered.
• It incorporates the national curriculum into the framework with other textbooks and instructional materials.
• It provides software that allows adults who have missed extended periods of schooling and nomadic students to catch up rapidly by thorough testing and only teaching subjects not already known by the learner.
• Where a local "community center approach" is taken, it provides resources for teenage girls that help them stay in school until graduation.
• It stores student information (demographics, class registrations, attendance, assessment results, etc.) in a common location so that the operational data can be used by those in authority to create statistics and allows them to get current progress in our schools, instead of relying on older submitted reports.  Additionally, it relieves the school administration from the task of creating and submitting reports.

Over the next five years, our primary impact goal is to provide some of the same educational effectiveness to low-income areas in Africa as we have seen in many of Visual Software's customers, using the same software.

One such example is Desert Sands Unified School District in California.  Visual Software worked with them for over 12 years, and through using our software to provide resources and connect the community schools, enabling them to improve some of their schools from some of the lowest performing in the state to some of the highest-ranking statewide.

Desert Sands has a similar demographic as some of the places we're working with in Africa - they have one small wealthy neighborhood in their district (Coachella Valley), but the rest of the district (97%) have students who receive lunch assistance.

A second impact goal is to demonstrate to the national government the benefits of such systems in terms of educational effectiveness.  We have already been meeting with top-ranking officials in several countries who have indicated an interest in deploying such a solution nationwide if the pilots prove to be successful.  In Ghana, this would impact over 12 million students; in Sierra Leone, about 5 million students.

Lastly, it would impact those groups of adults who were forced to miss major parts of their education, such as young women forced into early marriages, those who had to drop out because of an early pregnancy, child soldiers and more.

One of the first systems we will put in place will be the Student Management System and supporting software (such as Identity Management).  This will be the only system that is required to connect regularly to the Internet to update a common central database.  From this central database, we will be able to track student attendance and achievement without requiring school staff to submit regular reports.

The principle here is to give them a tool that will reduce reporting requirements by taking what is needed automatically from their operating data.  The user interfaces they would use could be made similar to the paper forms they presently use, reducing the need for training and increasing buy-in from teachers.

The most significant advantage of using operating data for reporting as opposed to submitted reports is that the data will be much more accurate.  The software we use has a built-in component that can test the incoming data against national policies and remind the users in the school when the data is entered incorrectly.

This software is the same that has been successfully used to implement No Child Left Behind in several US states and similar programs in the UK and Australia.

With respect to UN Sustainable Development Goals alignment, see: https://www.eneighborhood.org/...

Some of the impacts we expect to see are:

• Better quality education - this is the result of many factors including 
  • Access to all subjects in all schools - not dependent on the expertise of the current staff
  • Software that helps students or adults "catch up", learning the parts of their education they may have missed
• Providing computer literacy training for all students.  For one of our pilots, we will be developing ICDL training that would help students obtain an official certificate of computer literacy, helping them get better paying jobs when they graduate.

The software behind most of our implementation has been developed by Visual Software over the past 22 years.  It is a high-performance low code/no code solution that was built to handle very large communities (several million students from the same location), but can also be scaled down to meet the needs of a remote school.

This software primarily uses Microsoft Windows on the server and Windows 11 on the laptops.  The databased used on the school server will be Microsoft SQL Server and in the central collection location, either SQL Server or Oracle.  On the school servers a hyperconverged infrastructure will be used from a company named Scale Computing (https://www.scalecomputing.com).  Using this will allow us to scale as necessary and support multiple operating systems concurrently on the same server.

This software uses an AI-based self-maintenance from Visual Software called Dexterity.  This uses features of Intel (and other) chips to continually monitor the health of the system and report it regularly back to a central control center, allowing them to monitor hardware health, databases, storage and networking components.  It also has the capability to run maintenance on the system automatically if usage patterns warrant it.

As to the solar energy microgrid, we do use existing components such as solar panels, controllers and batteries, but supplement it with a DC-powered charging station that eliminates the need for inverters and AC adapters.  (By eliminating these from the system, it reduces cost, reduces weight, reduces the amount of heat generated, improves performance and increases longevity.

Presently, our staff composition includes more women than men, more people of African descent than Caucasian Americans and we are willing to agree to MIT's principles of diversity, equity and inclusion.  Partners we work with in the African countries to carry out this work have their own published policies regarding this matter and abide by the laws of their respective countries.

The Executive Director of The eNEighborhood Project is of Hispanic descent whose family history includes slavery and internment in concentration camps during World War II (Grandparents).  See Guernica and testimony from one of their compatriots (https://www.yahoo.com/news/gue...).  His mother was one of the "Los Ninos" child refugees that grew up as an orphan in the United Kingdom.

We mainly provide value to the populations we serve by making sure that we give them what they need in harmony with their government's educational objectives.

We provide the software they indicated that they need and educational technology is required to support that software.  This includes everything except wireless internet service - laptops, networking equipment, solar energy microgrid and the components that connect them.

We have made arrangements with manufacturers who make the products needed to deploy and have made relationships with counterparts in Africa who will handle local logistics.  By making relationships with national government leaders, we have made arrangements for tax and tariff exemptions and have received confirmation from them that they will do what is necessary to enable us to proceed as planned.

In speaking with many national leaders, it was made very clear that educational technology is one of their most important national priorities, next defense, agriculture and healthcare.

Since we are a non-profit, our income will primarily come from grants, donations and from organizations such as USAID, Prosper Africa, UNICEF, USTDA and others.  We also expect that if governments expect the scope of these projects to expand to national implementations that they will provide funding from their treasury to compliment the foreign aid and other large grants they receive.

Countries who are nationally deploying this solution will allocate funds or arrange donations to be sent to The eNeighborhood Project to cover its expenses or, they will take over all the maintenance for the system internally (which could be possible with the right training).

Visual Software has been doing projects like these for 22 years and has refined the model so that it can remain small and do most of the necessary work through its partners through the use of online and in-person training.

We are near the beginning of the fundraising process.  Activity to this point has been privately funded by Visual Software and the Executive Director, Robert Hutchison.