Rising's 2021 in Review
As a wise man once said, 'Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.' With 2021 drawing to a close, here are some highlights from a topsy-turvy but transformational year.
January
Rising beat out competition from more than 1,000 other entries to be named a winner of the Schmidt Futures Tools Competition. Our winning concept was to deliver personalised Rising On Air audio content to learners on phones via an AI-powered chatbot called Rori.
After 4 straight years of shrinking enrolments, Omega Schools in Ghana re-opened for the new school year with enrolment up 5% on the pre-Covid figure.
Rising's Elsiemae "Mel" Buckle was named a "COVID-19 Heroine" by the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center.
February
In Sierra Leone, Rising’s new School Leader Support Programme, a partnership between Rising, Educaid, and Freetown City Council, was officially launched by the Mayor of Freetown. The two year pilot initiative is focusing on school leadership and raising standards in all 550 municipal schools in the city, which serve some 175,000 students.
On the back of being named to hundrED’s “Top 100 Global Innovations” last year, Rising On Air won in the Literacy category at the Annual Awards of the mEducation Alliance ("Mobiles for Education"). The awards seek to acknowledge exemplary edtech activities, with a particular focus on lower-resource developing country contexts.
March
In Liberia, Rising kicked off a new partnership with King Philanthropies. As part of our work with government schools under the Liberia Education Advancement Program (LEAP), Rising is testing and rigorously evaluating a new accelerated learning programme called FasterReading to help get struggling students up to grade level in literacy.
This year also marked the five year anniversary of the LEAP Program. From small beginnings in 2016 operating 5 rural government elementary schools, Rising now operates 95 schools across 10 counties. We're honoured to have had the opportunity to support the Ministry of Education in its reform efforts these past 5 years.
April
We published One Year On, the inside story of our pandemic response. When the scale of the COVID-19 crisis became clear, the way our team rose to meet the challenge was quite something to behold. This piece does a very nice job of telling that story.
Our AI-powered chatbot Rori followed its success in the Schmidt Futures Tools Competition by scooping the Grand Innovation Prize at the Jacobs Foundation / MIT Solveathon.
May
Former Omega student Tyrone Marghuy won his high court battle against Achimota School. Tyrone, 15, attended Omega for junior high school and scored the maximum possible mark in his BECE terminal exams, entitling him to his pick of top schools for senior high. He chose Achimota, founded in 1927 and historically one of the most prestigious schools in the country. There was just one problem: as a Rastafarian, Tyrone has dreadlocks, but school policy required all students to wear their hair short. The school refused his admission unless he cut it, sparking a national debate which gripped Ghana's social and broadcast media for weeks. He took the case to court and was successful in overturning the school's decision.
June
in Sierra Leone we delivered two days of training on safeguarding and school standards to close to 500 School Leaders representing the heads of nearly all the municipal schools in Sierra Leone's capital.
On behalf of the wider Omega family, students at Omega School Asempa joined citizens from across Ghana in a National Tree Planting exercise, part of the Greening Ghana Project. Nationwide an estimated 7 million trees were planted during the exercise, helping to replenish vegetation lost to deforestation and urbanisation.
July
Rising was included in B Corp’s "Best for the World 2021" list in the Customer category. B Corps are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.
August
All sixty-two of the Rising students who sat the National Primary School Examination (NPSE) in Sierra Leone passed. Their achievement was all the more remarkable given that they were kept out of school for 6 months last year because of the pandemic. 57 students (94% of the total) achieved an aggregate score of 289 and above, compared to 10% of students nationally. 10 students (16% of the total) achieved aggregate scores of 313 and above, compared to 1% nationally.
In its official report announcing the results, the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education also paid tribute to partners (like Rising) who had contributed to radio teaching programmes locally and nationally during and after the pandemic-induced school closures, noting that "without their effort overall performance may not have been as good."
In Ghana, construction works began on our new RISE school, scheduled to open in January. Meanwhile our Managing Director in Ghana, Alain Guy Tanefo, did a fantastic job talking about lessons learned from his 6 years at the helm of our Omega Schools network as a guest on Jenny Anderson's Learnit podcast. Have a listen here.
September
In partnership with IDInsight and Echidna Giving, we published the second and final report from a study exploring students' experience of remote learning and the barriers they faced during the COVID-19 school closures and their subsequent return to school. The report found an encouragingly high propensity to re-enrol in school once it re-opened but that the daily time spent on educational activities during the closures had been 90% below its pre-pandemic level, highlighting the degree of catch-up required.
Researchers at CGD published the final report of an experiment we conducted with them during the pandemic to test whether SMS nudges and one-to-one teacher phone calls might help students get more out the radio lessons. Confirming our own internal data, the researchers concluded that they hadn't. One of the things we like to say at Rising is that "however well we do, we always strive to do better" and so, while disappointing, the study has given us plenty of food for thought, and we're excited to have the chance to apply some of these lessons to some new work on tutoring we're planning for next year. Watch this space.
October
As part of our ongoing experimentation with new ways of delivering our content (as well as preparing for future school disruptions), Rising tested and evaluated using Interactive Voice Response (IVR) via phone to provide additional numeracy content to students in our Omega schools in Ghana as well as supplementary teacher coaching content. Although we didn’t see any additional benefit in learning for those students who participated in the student intervention, we did see improvements for teachers who participated in the teacher intervention.
November
Our Rori chatbot was named a "Breakthrough of the Year" in the learning category by Germany's Falling Walls. Rising's George Cowell travelled to Berlin to collect the award. You can watch his speech explaining what Rori is and why we built it here.
We agreed with fellow LEAP provider UMOVEMENT to implement our 'Learning Check' student assessment with the 5,000 pupils they support. This was one of a number of new partnerships we kicked off with other actors in the education ecosystem as we increasingly look to make the operating system that has powered our own schools available to others.
December
A landmark publication from UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring Report has urged governments to recognise the contribution of non-state actors in education and "to see all education institutions, students and teachers as part of a single system". The impact of Rising's work in Sierra Leone gets a shout-out in the report.
Finally in Liberia, we undertook our largest teacher training initiative to date, training more than 800 teachers at simultaneous events in more than a dozen locations across Liberia. In total we estimate that cumulatively more than five and a half thousand teachers have now received training in Rising's teaching methods since we launched 8 years ago.
What's In Store For 2022?
There's so much happening in 2022 that we can't wait to tell you about. Here are a few things to whet your appetite:
We've appointed our first Chief Technology Officer to lead our burgeoning content and digital business.
We're expecting to confirm several exciting new government partnership programmes.
We'll be launching our new RISE school in Ghana in January.
AND we're planning to complete our expansion to a fourth country later in 2022.
