Over 32 million out-of-school children and those from educationally underserved communities in Eastern and Western Africa stand to benefit from a revolutionary data-driven learning method pioneered by NewGlobe – a global leader in education services delivery, with governments taking the necessary steps, an expert has said.
Omowale David-Ashiru, group managing director NewGlobe Nigeria who made this known in an interview with CNBC Africa, noted that a recent study on NewGlobe’s method used in Bridge Kenya Schools shows that governments and children stand to gain if the method is scaled-up to address the problem of learning poverty in Africa.
“This study has confirmed that the gains we have using the NewGlobe method is amongst the largest ever recorded in a study like this,” she said.
“To explain it in a way that everyone can relate to, basically for every two years, primary students in a NewGlobe supported school like the Bridge Kenya Schools in the study gain an additional year of learning over children in other schools taught using traditional methods,” she explained.
“For younger children, 3 to 5-year-olds, that is early childhood, it is even better than that. In their case, for every two years in a NewGlobe-supported school, they gain an extra year and half of learning compared to learning in other schools that use traditional methods,” she added.
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Learning poverty has been endemic in Africa before being exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Recently, the World Bank at a one-day education summit in Accra noted that despite recent progress in education, 80percent of 10-year-old children in the Eastern and Western regions of Africa are unable to read and understand a simple text, and more than 32 million children are out of school.
Based on the findings of the report which was conducted over a two-year period by Michael Kremer, a professor and Nobel Prize winning Economist, and four other globally acclaimed researchers, David-Ashiru noted that “we are excited about the study because this kind of learning gains if scaled across the continent can actually resolve the learning poverty that we are talking about.”
“… we already are scaling it. When this study was done in Kenya, we were supporting about a hundred thousand children.
“Today, that number is almost a million. We are doing this in Liberia, Rwanda, three states in Nigeria and one in India and obviously more and more. It is scalable, and we are already scaling it and we are seeing the same results, similar results.”
She therefore called on national and subnational governments desirous of far-reaching improvements in their education sectors to embrace public-private partnerships that are capable of delivering rapid improvement of learning outcomes in their school systems.
The Edo state government through EdoBEST was the first subnational government to adopt NewGlobe’s methods, with impressive results.
NewGlobe’s method which was pioneered in Kenya relies heavily on data and expertise as a basis for teaching and learning. Unlike many other learning interventions which look at specific areas in educational experience, the methodology looks at the whole learning process.
Data is used for training and coaching of all the teachers while a digital learning platform provides real-time data analysis of what is being learnt and the results of the learning process is analysed to make critical decisions.
Teaching guides that are grounded in a scientifically-based pedagogy are used to instruct pupils and throughout the process of teaching and learning, the question of the best way that a teacher can present the curriculum and what is the fastest and best way that a learner or a student can learn is addressed.
