The EdoBEST Story: How a mission to transform an education system rallied community ownership to unlock learning.
Governor Godwin Obaseki, Edo State, Nigeria
“It started when we got into office when I won my election in 2016 and I had the opportunity to review and reflect on the changes we needed to make. At that point in time, we had a major crisis, a human crisis relating to irregular migration.
Waves of young people just wanted to leave, travelling across the Sahara Desert. At one point, we had about 30,000 young men and women from our state just waiting to cross from Tangier to Europe.
That raised an alarm for us. As we looked at the root causes of human trafficking and irregular migration challenges, we discovered that it could be attributed to the breakdown of the educational system, particularly the basic educational system.
Foundational education had become so weak that these children were never really provided the sort of learning required to understand life and how to deal with life and the issues of life.
That made us peer further to try and understand what had happened and what radical changes needed to occur to re-enact or fix the broken-down educational system.
We realised that first, to transform an educational system at scale, you have to focus on the teachers.
So, we had to think through solutions that helped us train teachers and give them the tools to manage their classrooms, to manage the pupils in class and govern the school system properly.
We looked at a variety of options, and NewGlobe stood out. For us, what was unique about that solution was first, giving us the capacity as a government to be able to deploy tools that would help us understand what was going on in the classroom, what was going on between the teacher and children in school, what the teacher is teaching and if these children are learning, and how to evaluate the outcomes from the process.
For us, that was the tool, that magic bullet we wanted, and NewGlobe technology provided that for us. We were able to first train the teachers in digital skills, and give them the teacher tablets where lesson notes were loaded in. So, the teacher goes to class, is able to take attendance, knows which child is in the school and has motivational tools and techniques to get the children interested in learning and then is also able to identify those children that were not doing as well.
What was unique and different about the EdoBEST programme was not just the fact of implementing technology in schools and training the teachers, but also getting community ownership and participation by setting up School Based Management Committees, getting parents and other stakeholders in the society to get interested and involved in what the children were being taught and what was going on in the classrooms and the schools.
Two terms after we introduced EdoBEST, a parent came to me and said, you know what, I have two sons; one is six and one is ten. One is in primary 1 and the other in primary 4. The 6 year old just wants to go to school every day, is very excited to get up early and forces everyone to get him ready for school because he wants his name to be on the Character Board and comes back and is singing his rhymes and counting his numbers, doing his alphabets and his sums.
The evidence is that children in the EdoBEST programme are reading 70% better than the average child in a Nigerian public school system.
Because of where we are coming from, for years, teachers never got training and nobody tended to care about them or think about their welfare, for them it was quite enamouring.
They were very excited because of the way we went about it — because we anticipated resistance from the unions — the first set of teachers we trained; we did on a volunteer basis. There was no compulsion. We asked, if you wanted to get training and you wanted to use technology in the schools, come.
The training was a wake-up call because the teachers who graduated from that first set of training now saw themselves as different. In fact, they said to themselves, “I am a digital teacher.”
Because of the connection with children in school and the performance of the children, we could see a certain level of renewed motivation from the teachers.
For me, politically, it has been one of my greatest investments.
I have benefitted from working with the teachers and working with the unions because they were all there rooting for me as they didn’t want to see the programme end.
In any case, you don’t have a choice. I don’t see how any government leader will not want to make education a priority or skills and jobs a priority for his own people.”
Taken from an interview with Governor Godwin Obaseki by The Economist’s Education Correspondent, Mark Johnson on December 6th 2022. An edited video recording of the interview can be found here.
