PRESS RELEASE — Accra/Salzburg, 5 november 2020,

Smart content combined with optimized utilization of state-of-the-art technology offers immense opportunities to close global and local divides and the achievement of the UN SDGs. Chalkboard Education was nominated as best national digital solution for Ghana for the international Award WSA, selecting digital innovation with impact on society. With this nomination in the Category Learning and Education, Chalkboard Education qualifies for evaluation by the WSA Online Jury 2020 among over 340 international nominations — a global diameter of digital innovation, from Canada to Indonesia, from Finland to Mozambique.

The WSA nominees 2020 show the richness, diversity, future, and innovation of digital solutions on a global scale and prove how digital technology can improve society on each corner of the world. …

Did you know you could leverage Chalkboard Education’s offline-first solution to roll out impact and satisfaction surveys at scale, seamlessly, reaching anyone on Earth with a simple SMS?

Surveys are essential tools utilised in most firms’ impact measurement activities. They are critical because they aid in collecting direct feedback from beneficiaries or staff on the ground, and impact data for statistical analysis.

In this article, we detail out a guide on how to structure surveys and roll them out with Chalkboard Education.

When can you use Surveys?

Surveys can be useful in a very wide variety of situations! …

Emmanuelle Rosset is Human Resources and Child Safeguarding Director at International Cocoa Initiative. Based in Geneva, she has led the conception and implementation of a mobile training program on Child Safeguarding, distributed to ICI staff across Ghana, Ivory Coast and Switzerland, made by Chalkboard Education. She is answering Paa Kofi Antwi-Larbi’s questions.

What is your mission?
Our mission is to improve the lives of children at risk of child labour in cocoa-growing communities. …

Get to know our team! After Lemuel Hawkson, this interview is the second of a series featuring the outstanding team from Chalkboard Education.

I feel my role is so diverse; it’s a blend of everything we do. As the C.O.O, I handle the company’s day-to-day running, which comprises customer projects, human resources, business development, and a little finance and accounting — ensuring that we are working within the law where we operate as a legal entity in Ghana. Additionally, I handle client satisfaction, checking in on them, and making sure they are happy with our services.

What attracted you to work at Chalkboard Education in the first place?
I joined Chalkboard Education in 2016, and what attracted me to the firm, first of all, was the application process. I saw the opening on Twitter, which at that time was a pretty unconventional place to see openings. I applied and met the entire team as part of the interview process. I liked their perspective on things and their vision of what Chalkboard Education was trying to do: as a student in Kenya and AIESEC representative in Ghana, I could attest to the need for easy access to relevant content. When I realised what they were trying to do, I joined, and it’s been great since then. …

Get to know our team! This interview is the first of a series featuring the outstanding team from Chalkboard Education, so stay tuned for more.

I develop the “Frontend”, which is everything our users see and work with: mobile applications, websites, etc. In our case, I develop the mobile application where trainees access their content and quizzes, the “store”, which is another application where students in Ivory Coast can buy courses with mobile money, and the “Dashboard”, where our nonprofit and universities clients can edit and publish their content, manage their trainees, and track attendance and progress. …

Author: Paa Kofi Antwi-Larbi, Communications Officer at Chalkboard Education

Teaching and learning in Africa have experienced a commendable improvement over the past few decades. With school enrolment in Ghana and Ivory Coast moving from 59% and 56% during 1999 to 86% and 90% respectively in 2018 (World Bank, 2018). These efforts have brought education a long way, yet we can still do better.

In recent years, we have noticed a somewhat diversified approach in the provision of education around the world; examples of methods include but are not limited to Public, Montessori, Walldorf, boarding, and language immersion systems.

The public-school system has been the most common approach across the African continent and, arguably, the world because of its accessibility to communities, standardisation, and cost savings it provides parents. The public system, a large-spanning system with a generally homogeneous curriculum, is essential, but booming populations and funding issues are putting it at stress, with classroom overcrowding, low parental participation, inadequate technologies, etc. …

Tim Maple-Foster is an experienced Primary School Teacher now working at Opportunity International EduFinance, a non-profit supporting schools and financial institutions in over 20 countries worldwide. As the Education Quality Product Development Associate, he has engaged with Chalkboard Education mobile training and measurement & evaluation services, in Ghana and Uganda. He answers questions from Paa Kofi Antwi-Larbi, Communications Officer at Chalkboard Education.

What is your mission at Opportunity International ?
We aim to get more children into better schools, so we work with school leaders to support them on how they can improve their schools, with the aim that we will see more children attending quality schools. …

With governments around the World slowly reopening economies — and schools — we find ourselves forced to make changes to how we operate, as well as cater for new regulations and needs that we simply never thought of before. Change is different, change is new, and it is often uncomfortable: reopenings puts novel pressure and scrutiny on school systems, and raise new questions many were not prepared to answer that fast. Reopening a school in the Covid-19 era is harder than closing it — but there are solutions.

What change means

Institutions will likely be heavily regulated, pushing for the creation of protocols to factor in various health requirements and operational adjustments. How to train staff on new behaviours? How to teach and enforce social distancing with kids? How to control? How to track and isolate new Covid cases? These are new, very practical questions to which each institution will need to develop their own answers, depending on context, resources, and calendar. …