TeachersFirst - an Edutech Presentation at TEDx Lagos by Chinenye Mba-Uzoukwu

Editor's Notes

• #3: I believe our people are gifted with an indomitable will to win, an irrepressible call to become, an irrevocable capacity to confront adversity with an intention to overcome, and most important, an unquenchable thirst to attain height after height, after height.
• #4: In reflecting on Nigeria, I have come to realise that when stories are told about our exploits, it is usually a story of overcoming, of facing the odds and reaching for the strength that lies within.
• #5: This land, our land, is green and its promise is inextricably tied to the fortunes of its over 109m citizens below the age of 30. If we must be all that we can be, realise our fullest potential, we must answer to the needs of these seeds. Our Tomorrow is nothing without them and our Today must be about how we create a fertile environment for their emergence even as we secure the heritage of our elders whose sacrifices cut the path through the wilderness to open up the verdant fields ahead.
• #7: Little else matters, and our journey must begin at the beginning, with a radical, urgent and comprehensive transformation of the education space.
• #9: Education is in crisis with statistical evidence corroborating a 3-decade old slide into a state of haplessness. Today, those with the courage to do so will quietly admit that they have little hope of seeing a turnaround in their lifetime. By some estimates, in the year 2050, Nigeria will have a population of 350m, the 7th largest in the world of which 65% will be below the age of 30. Today, the data from the Federal Ministry of Education indicates that less than 3% of the school-age population in ECCDE will attain a university degree or equivalent; 40% will attain JSS3, while 14% of the latter will go on to SSS3. We know also that as a national average only 27% of teachers in primary education are truly qualified to teach. From JAMB, we know that in 30 years since its introduction, the ratio of admissions to applicants has not exceeded 12% resulting in a total university enrolment of fewer than 900,000 in a country of 150m. From WAEC, we know that the pass mark of 5 credits including English and Mathematics has peaked at 28% of the 1.25m on the average that take the annual examinations. What is not so well known is that this has been so for fifteen years, and that the major obstacle to learning has now been openly acknowledged to be illiteracy in English language and basic numeracy. Yet, this is not about statistics; it is about vulnerable people, most of them children, who will grow inexorably into adults with increasingly narrowing chances of becoming functional and transformational agents in a country that by size and economic potential pivots the future of Africa. In a bid to bypass the problem, we pay on the average $6500 and $18000 per session to educate our children in private primary and secondary schools respectively, while 98% of the school-age population have to make do with a broken public education system. Yet by sheer numbers alone this latter will populate and run the institutional structures in public and private sectors that will determine Nigeria’s economic, social and political future.   We must act, and swiftly too, if the bomb of a poorly educated and dysfunctional yet youthful society is to be defused. And we must act in big, bold and disruptive ways because incremental approaches while useful often militate against the development of the momentum required to achieve a fundamental disruption in what is NOT working. The Next Steps If you are reading this, you are probably a part of the estimated hundreds of organisations and agencies engaged in different aspects of the Education Sector, in addition to the huge bureaucracy of the 3 tiers of government. So why is it NOT working out? We believe a possible clue lies in the absence of a cohering mechanism such as policy that ensures all initiatives are able to retain their core value propositions in the larger context of a defined framework. We believe that this framework must aggressively pursue blended learning as a concept to leverage the potentials of ICT in education to create 21st century learning. We believe that measurable and sustainable outcomes must drive every component of every program.    
• #10: The data from the Federal Ministry of Education indicates that less than 3% of the school-age population in ECCDE will attain a university degree or equivalent; 40% will attain JSS3, while 14% of the latter will go on to SSS3. We know also that as a national average only 27% of teachers in primary education are truly qualified to teach. From JAMB, we know that in 30 years since its introduction, the ratio of admissions to applicants has not exceeded 12% resulting in a total university enrolment of fewer than 700,000 in a country of 150m. From WAEC, we know that the pass mark of 5 credits including English and Mathematics has peaked at 28% of the 1.25m on the average that take the annual examinations. What is not so well known is that this has been so for fifteen years, and that the major obstacle to learning has now been openly acknowledged to be illiteracy in English language and basic numeracy.
• #11: The data from the Federal Ministry of Education indicates that less than 3% of the school-age population in ECCDE will attain a university degree or equivalent; 40% will attain JSS3, while 14% of the latter will go on to SSS3. We know also that as a national average only 27% of teachers in primary education are truly qualified to teach. From JAMB, we know that in 30 years since its introduction, the ratio of admissions to applicants has not exceeded 12% resulting in a total university enrolment of fewer than 700,000 in a country of 150m. From WAEC, we know that the pass mark of 5 credits including English and Mathematics has peaked at 28% of the 1.25m on the average that take the annual examinations. What is not so well known is that this has been so for fifteen years, and that the major obstacle to learning has now been openly acknowledged to be illiteracy in English language and basic numeracy.
• #14: The data from the Federal Ministry of Education indicates that less than 3% of the school-age population in ECCDE will attain a university degree or equivalent; 40% will attain JSS3, while 14% of the latter will go on to SSS3. We know also that as a national average only 27% of teachers in primary education are truly qualified to teach. From JAMB, we know that in 30 years since its introduction, the ratio of admissions to applicants has not exceeded 12% resulting in a total university enrolment of fewer than 700,000 in a country of 150m. From WAEC, we know that the pass mark of 5 credits including English and Mathematics has peaked at 28% of the 1.25m on the average that take the annual examinations. What is not so well known is that this has been so for fifteen years, and that the major obstacle to learning has now been openly acknowledged to be illiteracy in English language and basic numeracy.
• #17: Within 3 years, we project that over 60% of Nigeria’s population of 168m will be either occasionally-, or always-connected to local and global clouds.
• #18: Drawing especially from the widespread failure of similar programmes in Nigeria and across the globe, we developed Attain!™ , an e-learning framework which recognises the need for an educational ecosystem (school, district or other constituency) to have a coherent, fully integrated, yet flexible end-to-end technology platform that is easy to deploy and maintain. Attain!™ asserts that the overall outcomes in the education sector must be driven by a holistic approach to the ecosystem. By ecosystem, it is understood that all stakeholders are part of a community but retain specific interests in how the overall community evolves. Attain!™ is built on conceptual premises that anchor current best practice in Education across the world
• #19: Attain!™ puts the student at the centre of a 21st century learning paradigm yet emphasizes the role of the teacher in driving learning outcomes. As a consequence, training and professional development are integrated with the framework to gain buy-in and sustainability.
• #22: Four years on from its adoption by the visionary leadership of Cross River State, with over 10,000 teachers at all tiers of the education system owning and trained to certification level in the use of laptops pre-loaded with educational tools and titles in over 200 schools across all Local Governments, the Attain! Programme is an integral part of a completely revamped Education Strategy that will help the State attain and sustain the needed competencies that will empower children to be producers of knowledge, and not simply consumers of content delivered by their teachers.
• #30: Four years on from its adoption by the leadership of Cross River State, with over 10,000 teachers at all tiers of the education system owning and trained to certification level in the use of laptops pre-loaded with educational tools and titles in over 200 schools across all Local Governments, the Attain! Programme is an integral part of a completely revamped Education Strategy that will help the State attain and sustain the needed competencies that will empower children to be producers of knowledge, and not simply consumers of content delivered by their teachers.
• #32: My personal journey from Veterinary Medicine, through Political Science (brief stopover in MBA Finance), Marketing Communications and finally, Information Technology (software) has brought me full circle to the understanding that the purpose of education is to enable Learning; that learning is a path, not a destination; and that we must harness the national aspirations to the potentials of technology for powering the pragmatic development of a world-class, innovation –oriented and entrepreneurial work force. Using technology we must build the new “factories” that produce the human capital we need to secure our Future.
• #33: We believe that we have lit a candle, 10, 000 actually and with an additional 49 schools in 12 states entering into the programme, and an expected rollout to another 10,000 teachers in two states by January 2014, we believe the momentum for transformation is building.
• #34: It was at a Pan-African Conference on Technology in Education in 2008 in Accra, Ghana that I re-learnt the humility of my youth and these words of Mother Teresa came to life for me…. I had been invited to close –out the Conference which my then company Microsoft was largely sponsoring. In my remarks, I had confessed to the audience that I had never understood why whenever I met an old teacher of mine, he/she would smile warmly despite the often worn-out, obviously “poor” look about them. The Conference Coordinator promised an answered if I stayed till the end. I am glad I did and here are her words:
• #35: I cried openly as my mind went back in time….If you are in this audience, in the hall, a your homes or offices across this land, if you can recall a teacher in your life who looked at you and put you first by striving to bring out the best in you, please stand up as I am and show honour to whom honour is long overdue. Then join me in pledging a new beginning for our children, our nation and our continent by simply saying, “Teacher First”.