Gideon Olanrewaju is the founder of Aid to Rural Education Initiative, AREAi – a non-profit volunteer-driven social enterprise that seeks to improve the access and quality of education available to disadvantaged children in rural communities across Africa. He spoke to ADAM ALQALI about his organisation’s work
How far have you gone in achieving AREAi’s vision of improving access and quality of education available to poor and disadvantaged children in rural communities across Africa?
From 2014 to date we have impacted on the lives of 6,000 students from across 4 schools in 4 rural communities. Since we are a nonprofit organisation which relies on donations to fund its activities, each year we adopt and work with one school, this also helps us achieve more quality, impact and sustainability.
After adopting a particular school, we design a project that suits the school taking into cognizance their specific challenges to come up with solutions for them, it is called context specificity. Poverty is a huge barrier for access to education in such rural communities where we work as such we provide economic empowerment opportunities to mothers to be able to support their children’s education.
In 2015, we built a library at a community called Apete Community High School at Ibadan; the construction of the library was made possible with the support of MTN Foundation who provided customized chairs and desks for the library. We also partnered a group called SDG Nigeria to launch an online campaign aimed at securing book donations from across the world and within a short period of time, we were able to secure about 5,000 educational materials for the library.
Another organisaton called Teach for Nigeria also donated books which they also got from Teach for All in the US, the National Library also donated some books and that was how we established a library for the school in a hitherto abandoned classroom. We were able to also source for laboratory hardware and set up a science laboratory for the school’s students of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
We also conducted academic excellence training workshops for the school’s teaching staff to improve their capacity. As a result of our intervention, the students of the school in Apete recorded a 43% improvement in their performance at the subsequent SSCE exams, against the previous year’s 12%.
The subsequent year we intervened at GCI College Ibadan where we conducted a needs assessment survey and realized that what the students of the school needed was vocational skills, and not necessarily literacy and numeracy skills. This was because we have realized that our educational system and curriculum in Nigeria has become outdated which means Nigerian graduates could not compete with their counterparts from other parts of the world.
So, we designed a non-conventional education for sustainable development (ESD) forum, which gave the students the opportunity to freely express themselves artistically or vocally or in any way that make them felt free; it was based on the UNESCO model of quality education which comprises of five components which are learners, learning environment, processes, content and outcomes.
So, our ESD forum was much more beyond providing infrastructural support instead about providing content-driven interventions as such we were able to empower the students with skills that they could use in designing solutions for challenges within their families and communities. The essence of being educated is to be able to solve family, community and global challenges. Our aim was developing thinkers and social innovators and what we did was really transformative.
Nonprofits founded by young people such as yours always grapple with the challenge of access to funding, how are you able to source funds to execute projects?
I am able to overcome this challenge by leveraging my personal network, using a model called resource mobilization model which is about identifying the project we need to execute in a particular location and then costing it before approaching potential donors to ask them to directly fund a particular aspect of the project. We don’t ask for money. Therefore, in the past 3 years we have got donations of computers, books, etc. Of course it is limiting but if you know how to navigate your way it’s quite rewarding.
Where do you hope to see AREAi in the next 10 years, in terms of improving access and quality of education available to poor and disadvantaged children in rural communities across Africa?
One of the things we are trying to do at AREAi now is decentralize our intervention model to be able to reach poor and rural communities across Africa, based on the experiences I have acquired studying as educational development practitioner at the University of Sussex. We are designing a concept that will respond to quite a number of issues when it comes to education. It will respond to the issue of access, inclusivity, equity, and quality.
Now, this model is what we seek to distribute across Africa in the next 10 years, therefore upon my return to Nigeria in January 2019, I will be piloting the model in the northeastern part of the country and the idea is to replicate the model by 300, 000 by the year 2030; it is ambitious but achievable.
Having tested that model and measure its impact, we will then create an international movement of youth organisations and young people working to promote access to education. We want to come up with a community where young people can share ideas and resources as well as train young activists to ensure that the dream of achieving inclusive, equitable and qualitative education for every child is achieved by 2030.
That coalition will be used not only to build the capacity of young people but also to decentralize the solution AREAi is seeking to develop to address all the foundational challenges around access to education for poor children in marginalized communities of Africa.
