Reinventing Education in Kenya
If you need a clear sign that new ideas are needed to save public education in Kenya, look no further than Tuesday’s announcement by U.S. Ambassador Michael Ranneberger that the United States is suspending almost $7 million in aid to the Kenyan ministry of education until fraud in the Free Public Education program is addressed.
That seven-year-old program brought an influx of previously disenfranchised students into the national education system, but in the process created as many problems as it solved: class size rose, teacher recruitment stalled, and the program became dependent on outside donations from foreign governments and international organizations. That’s before you even reach the corruption that has siphoned off almost $1.5 million, or the program’s doubtful educational results.
A new venture called Bridge International Academies is reinventing the model for education in Kenya by taking a page from franchise-based corporations.
Father dropping off a child at a Bridge International Academy school with a “barn” style roof for air ventilation, an innovation in an area where many buildings have no windows or air vents. Credit: Bridge International Academies.
Bridge is rigorously studying and evaluating how to deliver the best quality education to Kenyan primary-school students at the lowest possible cost, but the most innovative aspect of their program is that they are examining every aspect of opening and running a school with an eye toward replication, so that new schools can be opened, many at a time, of a consistently high quality.
“Everything we do is done with the plan to scale to thousands of schools,” one of Bridge’s founders, Shannon May, told me. “Like other successful, large-network or franchise-based corporations, we are resolutely data-driven and process-oriented in order to achieve our mission. … We know of no other organization that is putting together what we call the entire school-in-a-box: all the systems and processes, from land acquisition and construction, to curriculum development and teacher training, to educational performance monitoring and evaluation, to school management training and auditing, to financing and accounting systems.
Bridge was founded in 2007 by three Americans: Jay Kimmelman, the entrepreneur behind the software company EduSoft, which helps U.S. public schools analyze student-performance data; Phil Frei, a technologist whose last venture enabled Malawian farmers to reduce the amount of wood they consumed in curing tobacco (Malawi’s chief export), thus combating deforestation; and Shannon May, an anthropologist who specializes in sustainable development. Together they have assembled a social-enterprise project that borrows techniques from business and social science to create a network of high-quality schools that remain accountable to parents.
So far, the results are promising. Three weeks ago, Bridge opened five new schools at once (they opened their first two, one at a time, in 2009), and average enrollment is already 119—a sign that parents have found reason to prefer Bridge schools to the more established private schools in the area. Early testing shows that Bridge students are substantially outperforming their peers across Nairobi in core reading and math skills. According to May, these students are even closing the achievement gap in English reading performance with students of the same age in the United States.
Rigorous evaluation, which international development projects sometimes shortchange, is a central part of Bridge’s model. (For more about how social-science analysis can make development and anti-poverty efforts more effective, watch Esther Duflo’s 2009 PopTech talk.) To measure educational and financial success, Bridge sets ideal costs for buying land and building schools, costs and schedules for hiring and training teachers and school managers (who are also hired locally), standards for teaching and teacher oversight, and standards for student performance. Bridge uses “direct instruction” to maintain a rigorous and consistent education in independently administered schools, scripting each class carefully so that, according to May, “we know exactly what is being taught at any given minute in the classroom, and exactly how it is being taught.”
Inside of a classroom with engaged students. Credit: Bridge International Academies.
To reduce corruption, Bridge runs what it calls a cashless school. All payments, incoming and outgoing, including payroll for all kinds of workers (teachers, school managers, construction workers), money for construction materials and school materials, and receipts of school fees, are made through the M-PESA mobile-phone payment system or Equity Bank. Signs in schools remind teachers and parents that Bridge employees should never ask for money, with a phone number for reporting violations. Off site, Bridge staff members use regular attendance reports to double-check that no student’s fees are diverted.
Can poor families afford these fees? A family pays 295 Kenyan shillings a month to send a child to a Bridge school. That’s less than $4, or about one day’s pay—usually the cheapest option, or among the cheapest ones, available in a given area. And relying on parents rather than outside organizations for funding makes the project more sustainable, reduces opportunities for corruption by shortening the path between funder and school, and above all, makes the schools accountable to parents above all others.
“By running [Bridge] as a for-profit, the target population is changed from a beneficiary to a customer, and in that change they gain all the power,” says May. “It is the customer that can keep us in or put us out of business. It is the customer, our parents, who are in charge, and that is exactly how we want it.”
Parents are willing to pay for their children to attend Bridge schools, says May, because just walking past the school they can see evidence of the quality of the enterprise. These signs of quality may seem modest by our standards, but they are significant: Children are in class during class time. Teachers are in class, too, and they are actively teaching. Lessons are interactive, with frequent responses from students. “From the parents’ perspective,” says May, “this means that there is never a time they walk by a classroom and see a teacher wondering what to write on the board, or confused about the correct answer to a problem, or sitting at their desk while the students ‘self-study.’”
In December, Omidyar Network gave Bridge International Academies a $1.8 million grant [updated February 1, 2010] equity investment (which will be repaid along with additional returns) to scale up its network of schools. Seven schools exist so far; in May, between five and ten more will open. After that, Bridge hopes to launch at least ten schools at a time and very quickly start launching 20 to 30 schools at a time. Within five to eight years, Bridge intends to open hundreds of schools annually and expand into other parts of Kenya and other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, with the goal of establishing 1,800 schools by 2015. Crystal Hutter, the investment lead for Omidyar Network, says that if the program succeeds, it could serve as a model for other parts of the world and other areas of social enterprise. -- Joshua J. Friedman is a writer in New York City. He is a former editor of The Atlantic and Boston Review.
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Great article; thanks for sharing. Love the idea of a for profit, cashless, franchise based, replicable and scalable ‘school in a box’ approach! Gray Ghost ventures has also been focusing on affordable private schools for the poor: http://www.grayghostventures.com/privateschools.htm. In order to provide capital for these schools, Gray Ghost also created the Indian School Finance Company: http://www.isfc.in/.
Name:
Ashni Mohnot
• There’s a movement to radically change California government, by getting rid of career politicians and chopping their salaries in half. A group known as Citizens for California Reform wants to make the California legislature a part time time job, just like it was until 1966.
2009 PopTech Fellow Paula Kahumbu (a Kenyan herself) provides a powerful response to Josh Friedman’s article above. It can be located here, and is well-worth reading: http://wildaboutafrica.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/are-donors-reinventing-education-in-kenya-a-response-to-friedman/
Ashni, thanks for sharing another example; it’s interesting that Gray Ghost has created a finance company to help their work in this area. Jimmy, can you be more clear about how you think that relates to this educational idea? Andrew, thanks for pointing us to Paula’s post—it’s important to have Kenyan perspectives on educational reform in their country as new ideas (often from outside the country) are being proposed, and I am hopeful Paula has other resources and references for all of us to learn more.
Name:
Kristen Taylor
Hi Joshua, Andrew, Kirsten and others, I’m critical of aid that bypasses relevant authorities to do the jobs that the government is supposed to do. Having said that I do love the idea of it being in a box for scalability and can see how the concept could work beautifully for small business ideas like farming. Most unemployed Kenyans find themselves farming and they have zero training in this area. Indeed many of our farmers are destroying the soils natural fertility due to ignorance. I can see how a toolkit in a box could transform this – how to lay out and manage your farm, document costs and revenues etc. A final comment, another experimental system was proposed by Eduvision – another American aid group. They provided a school in Western Kenya with computers and provided paperless classes for a year. It was amazing, but after the year they took the devises away. The children were devastated. When ti comes to education we can’t afford to conduct experiments with a high risk failure – the consequences for the individual students could be life lasting.
Thanks, Paula. I agree, it is so important to think about the lasting goals and effects, how potentially significant an impact educational reform can have on an entire generation. I notice an emphasis in Joshua’s post on the role of the parents to bolster and demand accountability in this particular example—a role that is worth continuing to think through, I think, especially in the financial part. On Kenyan farming, I’m happy to be able to point to your fellow PopTech Fellow Tevis Howard, who is doing great work on techniques for farming in Kenya with his organization, Komaza (http://komaza.org).
Name:
Kristen Taylor
In a spirit of camaraderie with those looking for innovation and working toward social change, I’d like to correct the presumption by two comments here that Bridge International is somehow foreign to Kenya, or unfamiliar with the context of education and economics here. First, the more than 60 Kenyans who work diligently and energetically with Bridge International would be surprised to hear it labeled a “foreign import” or an “outside” idea. We are proudly a company founded in Kenya, upon extensive research conducted in Kenya, and made possible by Kenyans who believe that this is a necessary mission to help transform the future of Kenyan children today, and tomorrow. All of our school managers and teachers live in the communities we serve, and 90% of our office staff is Kenyan. Bridge International is not an idea created from the “outside.” By the end of this year, we will be employing, training, and offering life-changing opportunities for more than 100 adults in impoverished areas throughout Nairobi, many of whom are having the first opportunity in their lives at running their own business—and that number will be expanding rapidly. Second, the Bridge International model is created from the inside through diligent and extensive research—one of our core areas. We’ve conducted extensive research on primary education across Kenya since 2007. We have a dedicated research team that is continually appraising the circumstances of families who are living in impoverished and underserved communities, assessing mobility, income, household structure, residence, and educational options for children. Moreover, if anyone thinks that somehow Bridge International is not going to be here next year, or is setting up expectations that will leave children or families disappointed or dependent on a service provided for a short time and then denied, they haven’t read Friedman’s article carefully. Bridge International Academies will exist, and grow, in Kenya and other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa as long as parents see that Bridge International meets a need that they have: high-quality, and affordable primary education for their children. Our academies do not close after a year because a donor pulls out precisely because it is the parents who ensure that the academy is open by paying the truly affordable 295 Shillings (<$4USD) a month. Hundreds of parents transferred their children from other schools in January to attend a Bridge International Academy because it is a better school at a more affordable price. They wouldn’t have done so if there weren’t a need for this service. Other parents were able to put their daughters in school for the first time because now they could afford to send more than just their sons. The reason that the five academies we opened this January grew to an average of 120 students each in 3 weeks (!) is because there is a social and an economic need for Bridge International in these communities. If someone thinks there isn’t a need for the education innovation we are delivering, they should speak to parents of the 1000 students currently attending Bridge International across Nairobi, or conduct randomized, stratified research amongst hundreds of families living in more than 18 different settlements across Nairobi. Living in Nairobi and working in these communities for more than two years, we know the conditions of families struggling in informal settlements, and know that they need better educational options for their families. To imply that families do not need a very different model of educational service provision to ensure the better future of their children now (not years from now or decades from now or some other time) is to abandon children of this generation to the mistakes of history. We believe that every child, in every community, regardless where or to whom they were born deserves a high-quality education today. Through the very unique Bridge International model, we’re able to deliver that service to parents today. Our work has been to ensure that Bridge International will exist decades into the future as a revolutionary means of transforming opportunity and basic education in areas that have not had such access by making truly high-quality education actually affordable to parents in Korogocho, Mukuru, Kwa Njenga, Mukuru Kwa Rueben, Kingston, Lunga Lunga, Maasai Village, Kiambio, and dozens of other poor communities. Of course, such a complex business can never be described in a few hundred words, so I hope that anyone who has questions about Bridge International will feel free to ask their questions of us directly. Shannon May
Bridge International Academies
Sharon, thanks very much for telling us more about Bridge, the research behind it, and the vision for the future. Appreciate your clarification!
Name:
Kristen Taylor
Your work looks great. One great way to solve problems is to ask the person asking the question e.g. 2. How else can everyone be A. Empowered to create innovative solutions so Can http://www.MUSTart.org build a Trust library with you too? Regards Edward Whyman http://www.WhymanDesign.com
(problem finder) if they know of the answer or if they can look into
solving it so they become the problem solver too:)
1.
How can enterprise and innovation be improved and created
institutionally? http://www.Traidmark.org is one way to create
institutional innovation.
How can anyone set up their own self sustaining innovation space?
http://www.BARcampBAR.org and http://www.FREEtraid.org both have
examples of how this can be done.
social problems and B. Self sustain themselves by earning enough to live
and learn?
http://www.twitter.com/whymandesign
First im very glad for the good work Bridge International Academies fraternity are doing to Kenyans. This is a good idea,high quality education at low cost.Parents in the slum areas in Nairobi have been dreaming that one day that their children will have quality education at affordable fees. The mighty Bridge International Academies fraternity are making this dream a reality.May the good Lord bless this noble job. Congrats to Shannon May and the rest who made this possible.
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