About a month ago today, I got the mail that I was accepted into the Innovative for Africa fellowship (IFA) and I was overjoyed. This meant that I would be get to work with peers to build solutions to real world problems. Turns out I was very right, one of the programs of the fellowship involved is a hackathon where we get to meet together and design a solution to a major problem using various tools and I am in a group that is working on a solution on solving education and edutech problems in Nigeria, cool right?
The first stage involved empathy, that is knowing what exactly is the problem by defining a problem statement, who does the problem affect and how exactly does it affect them by talking to users and understanding from their point of view.
Yes! After a lot of brainstorming, we came up with a problem statement - Many children in Nigeria are missing out on quality education due to reasons such as poverty and wrong parent/guardian orientation - how could unlimited access to quality basic education be made available to such children? And believe me this went through a lot of writing, rewriting, redefining and discussions.
Next we had to hear from the people, we divided the users into three groups the kids, the parents, the teachers. The primary victims of this problem we're trying to solve is the kids aged 6 and above lacking basic education. We had to hear from them and also the parents and teachers, so we went ahead to contact a few in these categories.
Then the issue came, how best do we contact them, knowing the state of the world today dealing with a brutal pandemic, we decided to make more use of emails and phones for parents and teachers but kids still required direct person to person interviews. We started off by introducing ourselves and what exactly we want to solve and how their answers would go a long way in helping us.
After a series of questions to kids like:
1) Would you like to attend school?
2) Have you attended school before now?
3) Why are you not in school now?
And questions to parents like:
1) What do you think of school?
2) How much education do you think your child should have?
3) what type of education do you think is best for your child? why?
Also question to teachers/corpers like:
1) Why do some kids not attend school?
2) What do their parents say?
3) Have you tried to recruit a child into school before?
4) What is your experience in doing this?
5) What can you say concerning children passion for study?
What did I learn from these interviews?
1) Some parents prefer their children become a source of income by means like hawking, selling, etc rather than educating them.
2) Illiteracy plays a big part in these problems.
3) Some parents say hand works pays better than education especially in this country with high rate of unemployment.
4) Despite campaign educating the girl child is still seen as a waste of time, they prefer learning trades and marriages.
5) In places like the north, security for school kids becomes a concern.
6) Some kids are not ready to leave their way of life in trading or farming to learn abstract things like arithmetic and are satisfied with their current way of life.
These and many more insights gave me new understanding towards this problem, leading me to the next step definition.
We then considered questions like
1) How do we find a way to attract children towards education and educational resources and programs?
2) While encouraging them to come to school, how we can ensure security of students that are interested?
3) How do we force the government bodies to enforce basic education on all?
4) How can we redefine education to mean something along the line of learning to gain skills and knowledge for business rather the status quo of getting jobs?
5) Are there ways to empower students from poor home who do menial jobs to contribute to the family income?
6) How do we reduce the rate of child marriages and discrimination against the female child on education?
This lead us to redefine our problem statement to something like this - How might we help out of school kids to get access to basic education as their right, while helping them solve their immediate needs and problems like poverty, orientation, child marriages, and more.