photos: d.o.b foundation

Illustration: Dietwee ontwerpers

Bridge International Academies

Summary

Introduction

Access to primary education is essential for a person to develop as an individual and as a productive member of society. But in many countries, the government seems unable to teach children how to read, do math and to think critically. The school performance of children in developing countries falls below the third percentile compared with children in developed countries. There are 75 million children throughout the world that do not attend school. Thirty percent of these children live in sub-Saharan Africa. Among the children that do attend school, less than two-thirds finish primary school¹.

Bridge International Academies has come up with an alternative to the generally poor quality public education provided in developing countries. Bridge provides school heads in slum areas a ‘school-in-a-box’ package, which enables them to run the school as an enterprise. The school head and the teachers come from the surrounding community. Each school is run as a separate enterprise and the salary of the school head is determined by targets. Bridge focuses on the subjects reading, arithmetic and critical thinking. The head office is established in Nairobi, Kenya and was opened in 2008.

¹UNESCO Education For All 2007

Goals

• Launch a chain of affordable private primary schools in Kenya:
• provide good primary education to hundreds of thousands of children (over time, to a million) that live at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. This will give them a chance to develop themselves and pull themselves out of poverty;
• set-up a financially sustainable education system that is affordable by people earning a per capita income of $ 1,- a day or less. The current median² per capita income of residents in neighbourhoods Bridge International Academies serves is $0.72 a day;
• increase the quality of education in African countries by making teachers and headmasters accountable for the results achieved by their pupils;
• verify high-quality education through internationally-benchmarked assessments;
• export the model to other African countries.

²The median household income divides households into two equal segments with the first half of households earning less than the median household income and the other half earning more.

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Background

Many countries have introduced free education in order to give the poorest people in society access to education. And, indeed, more children have enrolled in school, but the quality of the education provided has not been guaranteed. A shortage of teachers, overcrowded classrooms and ineffective teaching methods are problems that state-funded education runs up against.

The biggest problem in the education systems in Africa and in developing countries on other continents is the fact that teachers and school heads cannot be held accountable for the results achieved by their pupils. There are few incentives for them to improve pupil performance. The teacher is paid regardless, even though he/she might not being doing his/her job well.  Because of strong trade unions, it is difficult for school heads to fire teachers and parents have no input.

The Approach of Bridge International

Methodology
Bridge has developed a methodology that consists of detailed step-by-step instructions for the teacher. This method provides lessons of high quality: they are pupil-oriented and lively, and they promote the capacity to think critically. The results of the pupils and the management are monitored and evaluated monthly.

Cost Model
Bridge builds the school buildings for US$2,000 per classroom, including furnishings and the distributed cost of shared school facilities, according to a cost-effective model. Firstly, for each school half of the classrooms are built. While the pupils grow towards the higher years in school, additional classrooms are built to accommodate them.

Pupils
Pupils pay Ksh 295 (US$4) a month. This sum is affordable for the target group. Wages for a day’s casual labour are Ksh 300; so a day’s earnings of a parent will send a child to school for one month.

Teachers
Bridge recruits teachers from among intelligent young people that have at minimum completed their secondary education. Bridge trains its own teachers who are made responsible for the results of their pupils and are given continual support.

Co-investors / partners

d.o.b foundation joined with two other European organizations to be amongst the early investors in Bridge International Academies.

Hilti Foundation was founded in 1996 by the Martin Hilti Family Trust. Hilti Foundation supports worldwide social, cultural and educational projects that make a sustainable contribution to social development. The Hilti Group is the world leader in the field of professional products and services for the building sector.

LGT Venture Philanthropy was founded by the princely family of Liechtenstein. The goal of LGT is to realise a sustainable quality of life for people in developing countries.

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Management Team

Jay Kimmelman, CEO
Jay Kimmelman is a successful businessman, as well as the founder and CEO of Edusoft. This leading educational software company supplies assessment platforms to public school districts in the US. Following the acquisition of Edusoft by the publishing house of Houghton Mifflin, Kimmelman researched the obstacles that poor families encounter and their struggle to increase their opportunities in the areas of health and education. He spent 18 months living on a farm in China and, with his wife Shannon May, started a micro-lending organization there and a secondary school scholarship programme.

Phil Frei, COO
Phil is an enterprising business leader with experience on the work floor in the application of new business models for current practices in developing countries.
In his latest project he introduced a technique whereby small-hold farmers were able to increase their profits by 40% and decrease their consumption of wood in the curing of tobacco. This technique is now being used in Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia.
Frei also set up and managed a business unit at IDEO.

Shannon May, President
Shannon May is an anthropologist. She has conducted research into the economic transformation of poor rural areas in developing countries. She also revealed the underlying factors that determine the success and failure of local and international community development initiatives. May has taught at small rural schools and at UC Berkeley.

Nomvuyo Mzamane, Vice President of Instruction
Nomvuyo is a South African educator, scholar, writer, community coordinator and children’s rights activist. Mzamane’s doctoral dissertation concerned a paradigm she developed called 'educational entrepreneurship' to enable poor schools to do more with fewer resources. She co-financed and led the ‘Vermont Africa Institute for Teachers’. She also taught comparative education programmes that studied the education systems of various African countries from both ancient and contemporary contexts.

Issues and Challenges

The challenge is growth, acquiring land and finding good people.

Sustainability

In the model of Bridge, a chain of primary schools is set up in which the key components of successful franchises are copied. This leads to an effective and efficient operational model for building and running a school, supplemented with extensive training, support and research. Substantial investments have been made in the development of innovative education and management, the costs of which are spread over the growing number of schools. Scale benefits help cover the costs of educational development and support, the evaluation and measurement of this for quality control and the support of the school management.

Results up to now

At present (May 2010), 12 schools are active in the slum areas of Nairobi. More than 1200 children now have access to education via Bridge schools. A group of five schools was opened simultaneously in less than five months. More than 100 pupils enrolled within three weeks of the schools’ opening. The curriculum and all operational processes in the system have been improved. The organization has been enlarged. Bridge now employs 88 people, 22 of which work at the head office and 66 in the schools.

The plans

Plans up to 2012

• End of 2010: have 32 schools operational at which 10,000 children are given a good education;
• End of 2011: have 117 schools operational with 44,000 pupils;
• Create jobs for 660 teachers and 117 headmasters.

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