Building Student Confidence: Lucy's Story

Almost one year ago, we focused on Bahati Primary School, around two hours’ drive down a dusty road from Kilifi Town, one of the most rural regions in Kenya, where the mainstay of the economy is tree and crop planting. Despite its remote location and limited resources, the school continues to be one of the most successful in iMlango.

The teachers are strongly engaged and ensure that the lab timetable is well adhered to, having overcome their “ICT phobia”, as we reported last January. Attendance monitoring is carried out efficiently, and the proportion of pupils at this school who attend the computer lab lessons has always been consistent. However, this term the school has been experiencing power related challenges that have caused frequent blackouts in the area, hence there has been a downturn in access. Nonetheless, during days with power, the computer lab is utilised to its maximum potential.

The school has population of 177 girls and 196 boys with 12 teachers. One of the students is Lucy. She is 13 years old, and lives with her mother and two siblings in a village called Ngamani. Lucy is in Standard 5, and loves learning in the ICT lab. As well as accessing the facility during school hours, she chooses to spend her lunch and games times there too! She says: “When I go to the lab, my favourite content is Stories, Longhorn and Maths 123. Each of these areas offers me a different learning experience. I look forward to coming to school to gain more knowledge”.

True to her statement, the chart below shows the proportion of time Lucy spent accessing the content in October 2019. (NB: Maths:Literacy has an 80:20 time split in the curriculum, hence the seemingly heavy weighting on the former).

Proportion of time spent accessing content on the learning platform

Apart from Maths and enjoying reading and carrying out the comprehension tasks in Stories, Lucy has worked through the relevant revision exercises on Longhorn. A programme-generated report for the year has shown that she has successfully completed revision tasks and 13 assessments in English, and others in Science, CRE and Kiswahili.

Is all Lucy’s hard work having the desired effect? It certainly seems to be, at least in English, and her consistent access to assessment papers via Longhorn has helped her to prepare for her school-based exams. Her English teacher, Mr. Safari Thoya, says “the Longhorn quizzes in the iMlango portal have the same structure as the exams we do in class, and I believe having regular practice with them can help a pupil to build confidence, even when sitting for the exams”.  Indeed, the report shows Mary’s progress in her Opener, Mid and End of Term exams in each of the 3 terms (see graph below):

At the end of this academic year, Lucy’s consistent access to the online learning materials has without doubt helped her to achieve the fantastic grades she has attained this year, scoring 92% in Maths, and 90% in English in the end of year exams. This makes her the second highest performing student, and highest performing girl in the class.

iMlango has enabled Lucy to attend school and has thus provided the key to her learning to read, understand and write. She has applied herself exceptionally well and can now be very proud of her success. Keep up the good work, Lucy – the future looks bright!

Until next time,

The iMlango Team

Raising Career Aspirations: Mary's Story

Seiyo Primary School is found in Kesses subcounty, in Uasin Gishu. It’s three kilometres off of Eldoret-Nakuru highway, and the school has a total population of 357 pupils, made up of 176 girls and 181 boys.

Mary is a class eight pupil at Seiyo, and sixth born in a family of eight children. Her mother is Mrs. Susan, who is a small-scale farmer and an iMlango microfinance loan customer.

Mary says that iMlango has given her an opportunity to go to the lab and read stories, as well as improve her literacy skills in answering comprehension questions, defining new words, and writing compositions out of the new words.

She told the team of how the iMlango learning platform has provided important revision tools, which she uses to prepare for her exams.

‘My results have improved since I started going to the computer lab. Thank you iMlango for bringing the computers to our schools’’, said Mary.

Her target KCPE result is 330 marks out of a possible 500 marks. She aspires to join Loreto Matunda Girls High School in Uasin Gishu, as it is well known for good academic performance, as well as producing good citizens in the community.

From her above results, we can see that there is a positive improvement from her first exam, where she scored 211/500, and now the end of term two where she achieved 279/500, which is a great improvement.

Her class teacher confirmed that she attends school consistently because she loves going to the computer lab to learn.

Figure 1: Mary’s revision attempts, as shown in the learning platform

Mary is aware of how the revision quizzes in the learning platform can help her in revising for the National Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exams that she will be sitting for at the end of the year, and therefore has used the digital revision papers constantly, as shown by the figure above.

During the field team’s visit to Mary’s school, she advised that she is passionate about being a Doctor when she grows up, so that she can help people in need in her community. And with the digital learning tools available to Mary through iMlango, she’s well on the way to fulfilling her career aspiration.

Until next time,

The iMlango Team

World Bank Report warns of Crisis in Kenya’s Education System

In October, the Daily Nation newspaper in Kenya ran an article in which the senior education specialist from the World Bank was quoted as saying that children going through the Kenyan education system are losing an estimated three years of education.

The article read: “What this means is that a Kenyan child can expect to go to school for 11 years out of which they will only do learning worth eight years,” said the bank’s senior education specialist Huma Waheed at their offices in Nairobi. “When years of schooling are adjusted for quality of learning, this is only equivalent to 7.8 years, a learning gap of 2.9 years. This means Kenyan school-going children are having a learning loss of close to three years. Going to school doesn’t mean that children are learning and this is mainly because of the quality of education,” she added. To read the full Daily Nation article, please click here.

After six years of working intensely with some 4,000 teachers in over 200 of Kenya’s rural marginalised schools, we have a good understanding of the challenges faced by teachers and by an education system which struggles to cope with limited budgets and huge class sizes. iMlango has been investing in learning tools for children and in helping teachers teach, with focus especially on mathematics and literacy.

One of our aims is to help ensure that children in these communities grow up as natives in the digital economy, articulate and equipped for taking advantage of and contributing to the productivity opportunities that the sector can bring. Over the years, we have seen some great steps forward in the schools, and we are especially pleased with some of the advances in literacy that children are making.

The reality is that it’s not just about the role of the teachers, but the whole community in being advocates of education, with parents ensuring children are in school. We work to raise the understanding of these issues with real data, as well as making sure that teachers have the tools to help children learn.

Adam Smith, Chief Executive, sQuid

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To find out more about the iMlango programme, please contact us