Digital tool helping to bridge quality gaps in remote schools

While growing up in a remote village of Kajiado County, Mohammed Shariff experienced firsthand a lack of quality education among children from marginalised communities.

He challenged himself to help in efforts to provide them with affordable and premium education.

“While in some regions like Nairobi many students make it to the university, in places such as the Coast or Northern part of Kenya, nearly 85 percent of students do not make it,” says Mr Shariff.

“A school in Garissa that has about 100 students for instance will have only two or at times no student at all attaining grade C+ and above.”

And so after completing his computer science studies two years ago, Mr Shariff did not hesitate to use his newly acquired skills to develop a tool that would potentially bridge this gap.

Together with his associate Naheed Manjoni, Mr Shariff set out to develop a digital platform known as Dawati that connects students to education material produced by teachers who work in national schools.

To develop the prototype of the platform, Shariff and Manjoni approached Eddie Malitt, chief executive officer of Carrel Technologies who agreed to incubate them under his company, which specialises in the provision of high-end technology services.

Once they were able to stand on their own feet, the two then went ahead to approach teachers from Alliance High, Kenya High and Pangani High School, to help them in development of quality content.

“Schools that perform well are well resourced in terms of both teachers and equipment. Most times, you cannot move these teachers to other schools. A teacher in Pangani Girls for instance would not willingly move to Lodwar high school because they have more opportunities in Nairobi. The only way to move these teachers was virtually,” notes Mr Shariff.

Currently, he says the platform offers content on the seven main subjects in the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) for Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE). Since it rolled out two years ago, it has been downloaded and used by 80,000 students from 5,000 different schools. Students access content through three plans - a monthly plan of Sh350, a termly plan (four months) of Sh750, and an annual plan of Sh2000, but 15 percent of the content is accessible for free.

“We are finalising an engagement with Telkom Kenya to subsidise bundles for students. For 6GB, it will cost Sh250 a month, which allows you to access content for around two hours a day,” says Mr. Shariff.

Because it offers content for practical subjects as well, he says the platform helps students who might have been distracted in technical classes, where missing even just a few seconds could mean losing out completely, to revise.

He says the platform also helps to counter the challenge of few slots available to national schools, as it offers a near similar alternative that keeps students who did not make it to these schools get quality education.

“Recently after KCPE results were announced, Pangani Girls had 111,000 applications for Form One, while there were only 336 openings, so you can imagine getting to Pangani Girls is almost more competitive than getting to Harvard,” says Mr Shariff.

“These schools represent our Ivy League schools. But since you cannot expand them physically, why not leverage on technology to make the quality education offered there accessible to all, whether you are in Lodwar, Garissa or Kisumu,” he added.

His business partner Naheed Manjoni says adult learners who aren’t going to school but want to sit for their KCSE exams can also use the platform as their primary source of information. It is essentially a cheaper substitute for conventional tuition, he notes.

“It’s a known problem that many parents who send their kids upcountry are also wary of the quality of teaching there. So, they invest in tuition during holidays. Getting a teacher for your kid’s tuition could cost you up to Sh2,000 an hour,” says Mr Manjoni, who adds that they also have a tablet, which comes pre-loaded with content so that even in areas with poor internet connectivity, students can access content offline.

“We recognise in many remote places the network connectivity is poor. If it is available, then the cost of connectivity is very high and because our content is multi-media, it consumes a bit of data,” said Mr Manjoni.

Schools in remote areas, he says, can connect the tablet to a screen or projector, and make the content accessible to all students, and adds that some schools in Wajir have adopted their concept.

“A tablet costs Sh12, 000, but we realise some people might not be able to afford that one-off, so we also sell it through a lease model, where you can pay Sh1500 upfront, then pay Sh30 a day or Sh900 a month for one year until it becomes yours,” says Mr Manjoni.

• The Lancet Commission on Global Surgery estimates that 98 percent of people residing in emerging countries, including Kenya, lack access to multi-specialty surgical services.
• The commission further describes this access to the services as including timeliness, safety, affordability for patients and an adequate capacity by providers.
• This gap forms a good starting point for pursuing the implementation of a multi-specialty growth strategy by clinics and hospitals.

It is an inherent ambition for most healthcare facilities to, over time, increase their scope of services in order to serve a wider catchment population whilst providing a broader array of clinical services.

However, the conundrum that most healthcare managers grapple with is on how, where and what specific activities to pursue in order to actualize this desire in a cost effective and, ultimately, productive manner.

The Lancet Commission on Global Surgery estimates that 98 percent of people residing in emerging countries, including Kenya, lack access to multi-specialty surgical services.

The commission further describes this access to the services as including timeliness, safety, affordability for patients and an adequate capacity by providers. This gap forms a good starting point for pursuing the implementation of a multi-specialty growth strategy by clinics and hospitals.

It is important for healthcare managers to digest available datasets in order to elucidate the characteristics of the disease burden surrounding their health facilities. Such datasets are available both internally and externally.

Internally, records of disease profiles attended to in the facility will be of use; especially of cases that eventually required referral to another center due to non-existence of the needed clinical services.

Externally, the Kenya Health Information System is a freely available online database that contains information on disease burden by type and location in the country. Also, there are specialty-wise medical journal publications that bear extensive information on various disease burdens.

As an example, one may establish that a general outpatient clinic in a hospital setting saw many patients with backaches and of these, the MRIs done showed that most of the patients had spinal compressions but were not definitively attended to due to the unavailability of a neurosurgeon or an orthopedic surgeon specializing on the spine.

The next step would be to consider setting up a spine clinic running on specific days wherein patients presenting with such back problems can be booked into. At this stage, a consideration may be made to invite a visiting specialist doctor to run the clinic on those specified days.

It is worthwhile that during this introductory phase, patients are informed on the need to subscribe to a health insurance scheme so as to limit their need for out-of-pocket expenditure and increase the affordability of such highly-specialized care.

As these occur, the healthcare manager should be forecasting on the supportive services that are required along this specialty line and making plans for the accompanying capital and operational expenditure.

If these cases require surgical interventions, this planning should be around ancillary requirements such as the availability of surgical instruments and implants, staffing cadre, rehabilitative services such as physiotherapy and so on. It helps a great deal to involve input from a specialist in the particular field.

Whereas this example covers a surgical specialty, the same data - driven approach can be applied in all other facets of medical specialties to ensure that an iterative and productive growth approach is undertaken.

The writer is a healthcare leader and geospatial epidemiologist

• The High Court has dismissed a suit filed by minority owner of Bluebird Aviation who accused his partners of siphoning more than $1 billion (Sh108 billion) from the airline through tax evasion, fraud and money laundering.
• Justice Alfred Mabeya brought to an end the five-year court battle pitting Adan Abdi Yussuf against three other owners of the 29-year-old airline.
• The judgment came after the Director of Criminal Investigations (DCI) cleared three shareholders and executives of Bluebird — Hussein Farah, Unshur Mohamed and Mohamed Abdikadir — from financial malpractices after a nine-month investigation.

The High Court has dismissed a suit filed by minority owner of Bluebird Aviation who accused his partners of siphoning more than $1 billion (Sh108 billion) from the airline through tax evasion, fraud and money laundering.

Justice Alfred Mabeya brought to an end the five-year court battle pitting Adan Abdi Yussuf against three other owners of the 29-year-old airline.

The judgment came after the Director of Criminal Investigations (DCI) cleared three shareholders and executives of Bluebird — Hussein Farah, Unshur Mohamed and Mohamed Abdikadir — from financial malpractices after a nine-month investigation.

The investigation followed a criminal complaint from Mr Yussuf against his fellow shareholders, accusing them of fraudulently channelling massive funds out of the company as part of a money laundering scheme.

Justice Mabeya dismissed Mr Yusuf’s allegations, saying he failed to prove claims of fraudulent accounting, tax evasion, fraud and money laundering.

“In the present case, all that the plaintiff did was to make sweeping allegations without any backing by way of evidence. He only stated that he had carried out investigations and made discovery of the allegations he made,” said the judge.

“The documents that were produced were not authenticated to prove any of the allegations made against the defendants.”

Mr Yussuf, who claims to own 25 percent of the charter airline, argued that more $1 billion (about Sh108 billion) has been stolen and put in offshore accounts and investments in Western capitals after being transported physically out of the country without declaration. He said the three directors were using the airport passes granted for restricted areas in airports to move the billions.

The DCI dismissed the secret movement of cash at the airports, arguing its investigation and probe by Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) found no evidence of money laundering.

The Financial Reporting Centre through the DCI said it failed to detect breaches while tracking the flow of cash in and outside Blue Bird Aviation.

Mr Yussuf claimed that his partners were stashing proceeds from the airline in international banks under Amazon International FZE. But Justice Mabeya said his partners had sufficiently showed that their relationship with Amazon was purely commercial.

“That the plaintiff had failed to demonstrate the directorship or shareholding of the defendants at Amazon or that they had stolen money from the Company and deposited the same at Amazon’s accounts,” he said.

“No faithful director exercising independent judgment would take any of the said measures, none of which are beneficial to the Company. In fact, all the steps taken by the plaintiff were contrary to the success of the Company. They were meant to sound a death knell on the company,” he added.