In the third part of this three-part interview (see Part 1 and Part 2), Joe Wolf and Kira Keane discuss the role of teachers in a table-based supplemental learning model and the efforts to adapt the model to three different contexts in Africa. Part one described the evolution of Imagine Worldwide’s approach and part two discusses Imagine Worldwide’s approach to make the work sustainable by building partnerships with government officials and local community members. The tablet-based program at the center of Imagine Worldwide’s work, developed by software partner onebillion, serves as a supplement for regular instruction, with each child in a school spending a targeted 150 minutes per week working independently on problems related to reading and mathematics. Imagine Worldwide partnered with the Government of Malawi to rollout the program in 500 schools in Malawi in 2023-24, with the ultimate goal of expanding to all 6000 primary schools, serving 3.8 million learners in standards [grades] 1-4 annually. Joe Wolf is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Imagine Worldwide, and Kira Keane is the Director of Communications. (Photos/graphics are from Imagine Worldwide unless otherwise noted.)
Thomas Hatch (TH): What can you tell us about the work that has to be done with teachers to scale and sustain the tablet-based model?
Joe Wolf (JW): The role of facilitator in the model is relatively straightforward. You don’t need a highly trained adult, and they don’t have to be a teacher. It can be a community volunteer or someone else, and that’s made it a very scalable model in terms of human capital. That’s important, because there just aren’t enough humans in these educational contexts. What makes this so scalable, in my opinion, is that when you have a single child and you have a single tablet, there’s an interaction between the child and the content that creates learning gains. When you move to one hundred kids, that linkage doesn’t change. When you move to a million kids, that linkage doesn’t change, you still have the relationship between the child and the content. Things do get more complex in that you have more equipment, and you have more schools, and you need to make sure that the equipment doesn’t get stolen. But when you have a model that depends on human capital, you need more and more and more teachers; and those teachers need to stay trained; and they need to show up every day; and they need to be able to engage one hundred children at the same time. It’s ten out of ten in terms of complexity when you have an inadequate number of teachers and you have to train those teachers to somehow be effective for those one hundred learners.
[W]hen you have a single child and you have a single tablet, there’s an interaction between the child and the content that creates learning gains. When you move to one hundred kids, that linkage doesn’t change. When you move to a million kids, that linkage doesn’t change, you still have the relationship between the child and the content.
TH: This is definitely a critical problem – how can programs be effective if they depend on more qualified teachers than can ever be supported? But then there are legitimate concerns that programs that don’t rely on teachers are sending the message that teachers aren’t important and that we don’t need those adults. How do you address those concerns that you’re trying to replace teachers with technology?
KK: That issue has really been top of mind for us, particularly as we think about our communications around the program. One very conscious decision we’ve made is to go back into the community to report on our research results. This means going back to teachers and saying, “Look, this is how your students are doing. This is what we’re learning. This is how this work can support you. This is how it reinforces your instruction.” From the beginning, we’ve really tried to include teachers as well as parents and community leaders in saying that “what you’re part of has implications not only for your own children and your students, but for the country.” We’ve had to be very mindful of that and of making sure that we build in feedback opportunities for teachers. Now in our implementation research, we have researchers going out into the community, conducting workshops and creating opportunities to hear from teachers so that we can continue to improve that process. But so far, our early implementation results and qualitative information coming from teachers is that it’s highly, highly popular.
JW: I also think that we just have to be realistic and fact-based with the current situation. In Malawi, there are one hundred kids per classroom and the average age in Malawi is 16 or 17 years old. It’s one of the youngest countries in the world. That means the number of kids is going to go up dramatically, but the level of resources is not going to go up dramatically. So you already have a problem, and the problem is going to get worse. You cannot build enough schools or hire enough teachers quickly enough or at low enough cost to solve this problem. That’s just the reality, and, in that context, many of these countries are eager to pursue innovative approaches. They’re not building bank branches. They’re going to mobile banking and now their mobile banking is so much better than ours. It had to be. It’s classic Clayton Christensen and his theories of disruptive innovation: where does innovation take root? It takes root in areas of non-consumption, where the status quo is not entrenched. The government of Malawi is really open about this and there is a real thirst for innovation. This is being well received by the government, by the communities, because what’s currently happening is not producing learning gains.
In addition, we have purposely situated ourselves in a supplemental, complimentary part of the government school’s timetable. There is already literacy and numeracy on the timetable, teacher led instruction, and that stays the same. Then we have a complementary supplemental period where every student is learning adaptively, and what we’re finding is that some of the biggest fans of that model are the teachers, because they’re saying, I have a little bit of a break during the tablet program, because the kids are super immersed in their own learning. The kids are showing up more often. Attendance is going up. They’re learning more; their attitude toward learning is improving. The teachers and the parents are seeing a higher return on investment of keeping the kids in school. There are just a lot of positive things that are happening for that teacher so that it isn’t in any way positioned as a replacement, as much as an aid that just makes their jobs easier and more sustainable.
“[W]e have purposely situated ourselves in a supplemental, complementary part of the government school’s timetable. There is already literacy and numeracy on the timetable, teacher led instruction, and that stays the same. Then we have a complementary supplemental period where every student is learning adaptively.”
TH: I think that’s so crucial. What a difference it might make for a teacher to have a period like that where they can see every student engaged. That’s just such a classic win-win. As we wrap-up, I’d love to hear more about scale-up. What have you learned from scaling across different contexts?
JW: We’ve come up with what we think are the preconditions for success in partnership with governments. We want to find governments that are already committed to:
- Bringing technology into the classroom for teachers and students;
- Boosting foundational learning; and
- Providing solar electrification for their schools.
We want governments to be already moving on this journey. Then we’re helping them get there, as opposed to trying to convince them to do things. We are out of the convincing game. It doesn’t serve anybody. But we know we need strong government buy in, so we need strong leaders within the government that are committed. We also need a strong local ecosystem of partners that can execute. To help with that, we fill the position we call the “ecosystem coordinator.” That helps us act as a group that is solely dedicated to bringing together the disparate pieces and stakeholders and having them all march forward together to do this work. If you don’t have somebody who has this as their only job, the work will not happen because there’s too much else going on. The jobs are too overwhelming.
“We want governments to be already moving on this journey. Then we’re helping them get there, as opposed to trying to convince them to do things. We are out of the convincing game.”
We also need a funding community that is interested in the places that we’re working. We need bold philanthropic capital that’s willing to go first and willing to do the things that need to be done to get the full government buy in. We need support to get to a critical mass of schools. We need evidence that’s generated specific to that context. We need the ecosystem to be organized in a way that you can create an executable plan. Nobody can make decisions on whether this should go to scale, whether that’s the government or whether that’s funders, without having that done first. And it’s the perfect role of philanthropy to be that risk capital early within a country. What we’re in the process of proving, is that if we do that well, the program is in a position to go to scale with government support and they government is also in a position to mobilize more international and multi-lateral funding.
Organizationally, we’ve seen that the demand is everywhere. Every week, there are countries asking us work with them, but we’ve decided to focus on four countries of different sizes, with four different languages. We want to work in partnership with these government and prove that the model can, in fact, scale. Then at the end of that phase, we’ll just open source everything and try to bring in a lot more players beyond us. We’ve decide to hone in on what we’re calling our “scale portfolio” with Malawi, Sierra Leone and Tanzania being the first three countries that we’re prioritizing. Then we’ll also have a Francophone country in that portfolio. If we do this well, I think that will provide the evidence that’s needed to figure out how to scale this. At this point, adding a fifth or sixth or seventh country, that’s not what the world needs. We know the demand is there. It’s more important that we show how we can build a system, in partnership with a national government in different contexts.
TH: Have you had to make adjustments or adaptations so that the model you developed in Malawi can work in these different contexts?
JW: Absolutely. I think continuous improvement is the DNA of our organization. How do we make the procurement better? How do we make the training better? How do we make those community sensitizations better? How do we better collect data in super low-connectivity areas? How do we take that data so we can improve the software and the implementation model? Innovation is a messy game, and it’s filled with fits and starts, so every day there’s a whole bunch of challenges that come up and a whole bunch of solutions that make the model even better. We have to acknowledge that as much as we want to create standardization in systems, every place is different. Our model in Tanzania will look slightly different than our model in Malawi, and we have to allow for those bottom-up adjustments. It’s back to that relationship between the child and the content. That relationship probably doesn’t change all that much. There are slight adaptations as you go from language to language or from national curriculum to national curriculum, but those are pretty minor. There’s a lot of overlap in the instruction. It’s really the behavior of the adults surrounding the program that may look different in Tanzania. Just as an example, one of the districts that we’re launching in Tanzania is bigger than the entire country of Malawi, so the logistics of working in smaller and larger countries have to be considered. In terms of other differences, in Sierra Leone, we’re working in standards one through six and in a context that is post- civil war and Ebola and everything else. That means there are a lot of overage kids that are way behind in foundational skills. In Tanzania, we’re only working in standards one through three, because that’s been a more stable place. Malawi is in between, as we’re working in standards one through four. That comes from very different realities in terms of number of kids that have to be served with that same tablet and that same content.
TH: Is there anything you’d like to add that you haven’t already mentioned?
JW: I just want to hammer home the importance of philanthropic capital. The governments do not have the early-stage capital. The Big Aid organizations are not going to be early – that’s not their job. Nearly half of the world’s youth will be African by 2030 – half! Yet there’s not a single foundation that any of us can name that writes million dollar checks for primary schools in Africa. The disconnect between the size of the challenge and the amount of institutional capital focused on it is stunning. So I do think that when people say, “What can we do about this?” Providing capital has to be part of it. A big reason why the work in Malawi has advanced is because some of our supporters decided to make a big philanthropic bet. It wasn’t just, ”Let’s fund 10 schools and see what happens.” This was, “Let’s fund five hundred schools in a year and see what happens.” That made it a really different conversation, and we’re having success in finding other bold philanthropists that think about things the same way. But it’s not easy. There’s not a lot of institutions that focus on this. Under these conditions, I think part of the work is saying, “Hey, whatever you care about world, if it’s environment, if it’s economy, or if it’s global peace, foundational learning is directly tied to all of that, and we have to pay attention to the region that will have half of the world’s youth in a few years.”
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