November 2020 Update

Rising On Air is a top 100 global innovation for 2021.

We're proud to announce that Rising On Air, the distance learning solution via radio which we developed in response to the covid crisis, has been named one of the top 100 global innovations 'changing the face of education in 2021' by hundrED. Every year, hundrED chooses the highest impact ideas from thousands it receives from organisations around the world, and this year Rising On Air was one of them. Rising On Air is a 20 week programme of language arts and maths lessons for five different age groups, designed for delivery over radio. It has been used by more than 35 partners across 25 countries, translated into a dozen languages, and reached more than 12 million children during the pandemic. Huge congratulations to the Rising team and to our partners around the world who all worked so hard on this for this recognition.

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Back to school

As schools in our region slowly return to something approaching normality - schools in Sierra Leone reopened last month; schools in Liberia and Ghana are partially open and will re-open fully in the next couple of months - we're excited to be launching a new collaboration with ID Insight. The focus is on understanding and tackling barriers to school re-enrollment for girls across our three operating countries post-covid. 

Along with the RCT of our covid response in Sierra Leone being led by the team at CGD, we're excited to be building the global evidence basis about educational responses to covid and its aftermath.

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Two upcoming events for your diary

On Thursday November 19th at 930am EST Rising's George Cowell is joining Dr Amel Karboul, CEO of the Education Outcomes Fund, along with leaders and experts from the Government of Liberia, the World Bank and the UN for a Brookings Institution panel on "Public-Private Partnerships in Education at a Time of Crisis: Lessons from Liberia and around the globe".

On Monday November 23rd at 2pm GMT, I'm joining Jacqueline Novogratz, bestselling author, impact investing pioneer and founder and CEO of Acumen Fund for a conversation about "Quality education for a quality life", hosted by Iqbal Khan from UBS as part of their 'Unfiltered' series.

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And finally...

Last month we graduated our first ever class of senior high school students. It was a big milestone for us. This was the cohort that six years ago found the start of their secondary schooling disrupted by Ebola. This year, the end of their secondary schooling was disrupted by Covid.

This is a special group of students, and I took to Twitter to tell the story of one of them.

Using Podcasts to Make Audio Lessons More Accessible

Rising On Air — our free distance learning solution that redesigns our proven, high-quality, structured curriculum content for delivery via radio and SMS — has reached over 10 million children in 25 countries. The scale of that reach creates opportunities to continue adapting both our curriculum content and the way we deliver it to students in some of the most remote parts of the world. 

When schools closed across Liberia on March 16, radio was our go-to platform to bring audio lessons to students — in both Liberia and Sierra Leone, only 1 out of 8 people have access to the internet, making online learning impossible. Radio is much more ubiquitous, reaching 70% of the population in both countries, according to our estimates. 

By sharing our audio lessons via the new Rising On Air podcast, we hope to enhance our initial efforts by making our curriculum available in a more flexible format that allows students to catch up with lessons if they miss a broadcast. We also hope to better serve students with learning disabilities, as podcasts can be played back multiple times and at variable speeds. 

We are sharing our audio lessons via a podcast after thinking about the Tecno phones most Liberians own. Since podcasts require just one download, after which they can be played offline, they are accessible to students who can afford only limited data and live in rural areas where network signals are unreliable. 

Our audio lessons are compatible with any standard podcasting app, though we recommend installing the open source AntennaPod app from the Google Play Store, as it does not require much memory to run, and is therefore ideal for low memory phones like Tecno. The availability of apps like AntennaPod allowed us to transfer our lessons to a podcasting format without investing in building out our own infrastructure. 

We also hope this feature will benefit our partners and others looking to adapt our lessons by making it easy to listen to how we have transformed our scripts into audio lessons. The scripts available to download on our website are culturally generic — we wanted to demonstrate how to tailor these for different contexts, by adding local background music or providing culturally relevant examples. 

However, we are aware that the way we have customized the audio lessons currently on the podcast will not necessarily resonate with students who are not based in Liberia and Sierra Leone. For this reason, we’ve been looking at opportunities, working with our partners at the EdTech Hub, to create a series of more universal podcasts so that the audio content is more culturally appropriate for a global audience. 

In the meantime, we are interested in collaborating with our global partners to include their adapted audio lessons on our podcast portal, after screening and evaluating all lessons to assure quality. Though we launched Rising On Air to reach students during the COVID-19 pandemic, delivering lessons via radio and podcasts is an evergreen solution that should persist beyond this emergency.

إطلاق بوابة رايزنغ عالهوا بالعربية

راجين الوصول إلى المزيد من الطلبة، أطلقنا بوابة اللغة العربية، حيث تتوفر نصوصنا الإذاعية للتعلم عن بعد. يأتي هذا بعد نجاح بوابتنا الفرنسية، التي وصلت إلى الطلاب في بنين، وبوركينا فاسو، وتشاد، وجمهورية الكونغو الديمقراطية، وغينيا. تعتبر اللغتان العربية والفرنسية من بين اللغات الأكثر انتشارًا في إفريقيا: بالإضافة إلى الدروس المترجمة إلى هذه اللغات، أنشأنا بوابات منفصلة لتقديم تجربة مستخدم مخصصة للشركاء الناطقين باللغة العربية والفرنسية.

يتولى فريق مكون من ١١ مترجمًا متمركزين في جميع أنحاء العالم والعالم العربي من المملكة العربية السعودية إلى لبنان، بقيادة مديرة المشروع سمية عبد الرزاق، مسؤولية ترجمة ألف حصة دراسية تغطي القراءة والكتابة، وفنون اللغة، والحساب في خمسة مستويات مختلفة من مرحلة الطفولة المبكرة إلى المدرسة الثانوية. تشمل الدروس كذلك رسائل الصحة والسلامة. بالإضافة إلى دروسنا، ستتوفر أيضًا برامج التطوير المهني، و نصوص مكالمات المعلمين للتقوية باللغة العربية.

تقول عبد الرزاق: "نحن لا نترجم الدروس فقط". تختلف طريقة تدريس الصوتيات والقواعد باللغتين الإنجليزية والعربية، وكذلك الترتيب الذي تُقرأ به الأرقام - يحتاج المترجمون إلى الانتباه إلى النصوص للتأكد من إعادة صياغة التعليمات. على سبيل المثال، عندما ترشد البرامج النصية الطلاب إلى رسم الأرقام، يجب إعادة كتابة التوجيهات بحيث يتم توجيه الطلاب لرسم الأرقام كما هي في الأرقام العربية الشرقية.

لم تقتصر صعوبة الترجمة على نصوصنا فقط، بل كان علينا التعامل مع عدة تحديات تقنية من أجل تقديم المحتوى العربي على موقعنا، فمن المعروف أن معظم منصات تطوير الويب مصممة لمستخدمي اللغة الإنجليزية. عندما تتضاعف الفجوة الرقمية بحواجز اللغة، تتفاقم أوجه عدم المساواة. أملنا في إطلاق البوابة العربية هو أن يتمكن غير الناطقين باللغة الإنجليزية من تصفح موقعنا وتكييف البرامج النصية مع احتياجاتهم.

يمكن استخدام نصوص الراديو العربية الخاصة بنا في أي مكان، من المغرب إلى العراق، نظرًا لأن اللغة العربية الفصحى هي اللغة الرسمية للنص المكتوب وتستخدم في التعليم في كل مدارس الشرق الأوسط وأفريقيا. على الرغم من أن دروسنا الإذاعية مصممة أصلًا للاستجابة لأزمة جائحة كورونا، من الممكن استخدامها لتقديم التعلم عن بعد للطلاب المتأثرين بأزمات أخرى أيضًا. تقول عبد الرزاق، التي نشأت في سوريا، "التعلم غير الرسمي مهم حقًا لمجتمعات النازحين واللاجئين، حيث يفوت الطلبة عادةً عدة سنوات من التعليم المدرسي". تسمح الدروس الإذاعية، في حين أنها حل مؤقت، بإحراز تقدم تدريجي للأطفال خارج المدرسة. "يعطيهم هذا الدافع للتعلم بأنفسهم، و للبقاء متفائلين."

يمكنكم الوصول إلى بوابة رايزنغ عالهوا العربية عبر الرابط التالي: https://www.risingacademies.com/onair-arabic

Launching Rising On Air in Arabic

To reach more students, we have launched an Arabic portal, where our distance learning radio scripts are available in translation. This follows the success of our French portal, which has reached students in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Guinea. Both Arabic and French are among the most widely spoken languages in Africa: in addition to lessons translated into these languages, we created separate portals to deliver a tailored user experience to Arabic and French-speaking partners.

A team of 11 translators, led by a project manager Somaia Razzak, and based all over the world — ranging from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon — is responsible for translating 1000 lessons covering literacy, language arts, and numeracy at five different levels across K-12, from early childhood education to senior secondary school. The lessons also include health and safety messages. In addition to our lessons, our professional development and teacher tutorial call scripts will also be available in Arabic. 

“We are not just translating the lessons,” says Razzak. The way phonics and grammar are taught in English and Arabic are different, as is the format in which numbers are read — the translators need to pay attention to the scripts to make sure the instructions are rephrased. For example, when the scripts instruct students to draw out numbers, the directions have to be rewritten so that students are instructed to draw numbers as they are shaped in the Eastern Arabic numerals. 

The trickiness of translation was not limited to just our scripts. We had to troubleshoot in order to get the Arabic script onto our website, as most web development platforms are built for English-language users. When a digital divide is multiplied with language barriers, inequalities are exacerbated. Our hope in launching the Arabic portal is that non-English speakers can navigate our website and adapt the scripts to their needs.

Our Arabic radio scripts can be used anywhere, from Morocco to Iraq, since Modern Standard Arabic is the formal language of written text and is used in schools in the Middle East and Africa. While our radio lessons were designed to respond to the COVID-19 crisis, they can be used to bring distance learning to students affected by other crises as well. “Informal learning is really important for internally-displaced and refugee communities, where students miss several years of school education,” says Razzak, who grew up in Syria. Radio lessons, while a temporary solution, allow for incremental progress for out-of-school children. “It gives them the motivation to learn on their own, and a reason to remain hopeful.”

The Rising On Air Arabic Portal can be located here: https://risingacademies.com/onair-arabic
It was created through the generous support of the UBS Optimus Foundation.

Rising Academies acquires Omega Schools in Ghana

Rising Academies has today announced the acquisition of Omega Schools, one of Ghana’s largest private school networks.

Beyond the immediate public health and economic crisis, COVID-19 has also created an education crisis, forcing millions of children in Ghana and around the world out of school. Making the schools these children return to the best they can be must be at the heart of the post-covid recovery.

By combining Rising’s proven academic model and track record elsewhere in the region with Omega’s deep community ties, operational expertise and focus on value-for-money, the ambition is to create a company that can play its part in building back better.

Since its inception in Sierra Leone in 2014, Rising Academies has focused on improving the quality of teaching and learning and rigorously measuring its impact. It works through low cost private schools it owns and operates itself, and through large scale partnerships with governments and other school operators. The company is a Certified B Corp®, only the third in West Africa and the first in either Sierra Leone or Liberia.

Last year, the final report of a randomised controlled trial of Liberia’s flagship education reform praised Rising for producing “a consistently positive pattern of results across learning, access, and safety dimensions.”

During the covid crisis, Rising created a free, twenty-week programme of radio lessons to keep children safe and learning while out of school. It has been adapted and used by thirty partners in twenty countries.

Founded by Professor James Tooley and Ken Donkoh in Ghana in 2008, Omega was an early pioneer of affordable private schooling, known for innovations like its daily fee model. It has since expanded to more than 30 schools in Kasoa and the surrounding areas.

The company’s previous shareholders have sold their shares to Rising and will not be investors in the new combined company, which will serve more than 50,000 students across Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Omega’s leadership team has committed to remain in post, and the company’s current CEO Alain Guy Tanefo will join Rising’s management team. 

Rising Academy Network CEO Paul Skidmore said:

“What Omega has achieved over the last decade is really inspiring. The post-covid world presents new challenges for us all, and we are excited to have the opportunity to help Omega rise to meet them.”

CEO of Omega Schools Alain Guy Tanefo said:

“We are grateful to everyone who has helped make this possible. Joining forces with Rising will boost our impact, not only in ensuring greater access to quality education, but also in improved learning outcomes. As part of the Rising group, we are set for a brighter future.”

ENDS

Notes to editors:

1. The Rising Academy Network (also known as “RAN” or “Rising Academies”) is a growing network of inspiring schools in West Africa. Its mission is “to create schools that open doors and change lives.” One of the fastest-growing quality-focused education companies in Africa, it is a Certified B Corp®. For more information see www.risingacademies.com. 

2. Rising is committed to transparent evaluation of its impact. Links to independent evaluations of its impact are available at rsng.org/risingimpact. 

3. Omega Schools Franchise Limited was founded in 2008 by Professor James Tooley and Ken Donkoh. 

Enquiries: information@risingacademies.com