If your inbox if anything like mine, it’s probably filling up with emails from organisations offering retrospectives of the last 12 months, and trying to reckon with what they mean for the future.
Well, here’s another one.
But we’ve tried to do something a little different with ours. For starters, we didn’t want to write it by ourselves: we commissioned freelance education writer Natasha Japanwala to write it for us.
Second, although for the most part it’s a story with a happy ending, it wasn’t obvious it would turn out that way, and we wanted Natasha to draw out the critical moments, especially in the early days of the pandemic, that set the course for what followed.
Third, we didn’t want it to be the story of an organisation but of the individuals - old hands and new recruits, senior leaders and junior staff - whose hustle, professionalism, dedication and ingenuity got us through the last year.
Finally, we didn’t want it to just be our story, because the story of Rising On Air also belongs to the many partners around the world who helped make it happen.
Here’s why I think it’s worth sharing. We founded Rising in Sierra Leone in 2014 just before the Ebola Crisis. When COVID-19 hit, a lot of people asked us for advice, assuming the experience of going through one pandemic would have left us better prepared for the second. For the most part, it didn’t. That I nearly got stuck on the other side of the world, thousands of miles from my wife and children, tells you everything about the quality of my foresight in February and March 2020.
But when the scale of the COVID-19 crisis became clear, the way our team rose to meet the challenge was quite something to behold. How and why they were able to do that that owes a lot to the culture we’ve built together over the last 7 years. It’s not perfect and we don’t always live up to our own high standards. But when we needed it, it helped us accomplish some pretty great things. That’s the story I want to pass onto future members of my team, and to anyone else who can take something from it. Natasha has done a very nice job of capturing it.
It’s a long read, but one I think you’ll enjoy.
Other news from Rising
Lots of cool stuff happening at Rising at the moment that I haven’t had the chance to share:
Hello Rori. As Natasha notes in her piece, one spin-off from our work on Rising On Air that we’re very excited about is Rising On Air Interactive, or Rori for short. Rori will deliver personalised audio clips from the Rising On Air library to users based on their conversations with an AI-powered chatbot. We’re building it with our friends at Filament AI, and with support from Schmidt Futures and Citadel.
New award for Rising On Air. On the back of being named to hundrED’s “Top 100 Global Innovations” last year, Rising On Air has also won in the Literacy category at the Annual Awards of the mEducation Alliance ("Mobiles for Education"). The awards seek to acknowledge exemplary edtech activities, with a particular focus on lower-resource developing country contexts.
New city-wide initiative in Sierra Leone. Rising’s new School Leader Support Programme, a partnership between Rising, Educaid, and Freetown City Council, was officially launched by the Mayor of Freetown. The mentors who will work with clusters of all 550 of the city's municipal schools have been recruited and started work.
Schools back in Ghana. Natasha’s piece rightly focuses on Rising On Air and so doesn’t cover the immense amount of work we’ve been doing since we acquired Omega Schools, Ghana’s largest low cost school network, in the peak of the pandemic in June. Schools in Ghana fully re-opened in January so we got the first chance to see how that work is paying off. Overall, enrolments are up nearly 10% year-on-year, reversing a trend that had seen enrolments fall 14% per annum in the four years pre-acquisition.
New evaluation in Liberia. In Liberia, Rising has kicked off a new partnership with King Philanthropies. As part of its work with 95 rural government elementary schools under the LEAP PPP, Rising will be testing and rigorously evaluating a new accelerated learning programme called RisingFaster to help get struggling students up to grade level.