A very Happy New Year to all involved in the iMlango programme and to all of our followers that eagerly await these updates.
This month saw the field team tackle the large task of registering all of the new students into the programme, which included new standard 1 students and older students as well. Over the course of the month, we enrolled over 5,000 students into the programme, issuing them with their very own iMlango contactless smart card.
In preparation for this influx of new students, we developed a brand new Registration App for our Android based attendance monitoring tablets.This native application has been built from the ground up to make the registration process quicker, and ultimately more efficient for the field team.
Students’ details are simply entered into the registration App in the classroom by the field team, linking their details to the student smart card in the iMlango data system. The smart card then enables the student to access the interactive learning platform, and for the teacher to monitor and capture their daily attendance. The entire registration process takes less than 30 seconds per student. Although, we found the process somewhat of a challenge with some of our younger students, as many did not know their full names, or how to spell them.
The field team also provided teachers with refresher training at many of the schools this month, which will continue over the next two months. We also held meetings with numerous communities to discuss and progress our sustainability initiatives. As a result of these meetings, we acquired over 90 local merchants for the support initiative, which involves distributing conditional payments and measuring their impact on the students’ attendance.
We’re very pleased to announce that a further 10 additional iMlango schools in Uasin Gishu County are now live with attendance monitoring, and that all schools can now access the Literacy Quiz on the learning platform.
The Community Internet Sustainability Initiative trial at the Arthi River Primary School, which provides Wi-Fi access to the wider community, has been very well received and we’re currently seeing the community consume 10GB per day on their own devices.
Lastly, we were delighted to welcome the Sustainable Rural Growth Development Initiative (SRGDI), a non-governmental organization from Malawi, at one of our schools in Kajiado County, where they were able to see students access the learning platform and attendance monitoring in action. It was a pleasure to host them and we look forward to their next visit.
Until next time,
The iMlango team