End of year round up from Steph, Rising’s CEO, celebrating 10 highlights from Rising’s 10th year!
This year was our 10th year of Rising. Founded in Sierra Leone in 2014, the journey of the past 10 years has been challenging but far more rewarding than we ever could have imagined.
What started as one school with 85 students, has grown into an innovative, integrated organisation of over 700 brilliant team members working with tens of thousands of teachers and a quarter of a million students across Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana and Rwanda. And most importantly, these students are learning.
As our 10th year comes to a close, we wanted to celebrate with 10 of our favourite highlights from 2024:
1.The World’s first chatbot tutor to deliver learning outcomes?
In February, a team from the University of Oxford and J-PAL published research showcasing promising results for our AI-powered chatbot math tutor Rori. The study, conducted over 8 months, included 1,000 students in grades 3-9 across 11 schools in Ghana. The study found that students who received two 30-minute sessions with Rori, on top of their normal math lessons, had “markedly higher scores” in math, with an effect size of 0.36. The full research paper can be found here.
Following on from these results, we have started to implement Rori in public schools in Sierra Leone, with Rwanda and Ghana soon to follow. To date Rori has acquired over 120,000 users! The Rori team have been working hard on further developments to the chatbot tutor with more exciting announcements to come in 2025.
2. Our first alumni bring home the mission of Rising.
In March, we sat down with a group of alumni from our very first cohort of students. These are students who attended our Ebola Crisis Home Outreach program in 2014, while schools were closed due to Ebola, and then enrolled in JSS1 (Grade 7) when we opened our very first school. Hearing from our alumni, we were blown away by the strength of their ongoing commitment to Rising and the Rising values. They spoke about the ways in which they felt Rising had helped prepare them for the worlds of work and higher education they are now navigating, especially in terms of leadership, confidence, teamwork, adaptability and self-direction. Hearing from our alumni was very moving and brought home the mission of Rising - to create schools that open doors and change lives.
3. RisingFaster is making a big impact and our students and teachers love it.
We have been thrilled to see the incredible impact of our RisingFaster programs throughout the academic year. These are programs that Rising designed to catch up students’ foundational literacy and numeracy skills. In Sierra Leone, our FasterMath partnership with Freetown City Council demonstrated significant impacts on both students’ foundational numeracy skills and teacher confidence across our 123 partnership schools. These results were achieved in our mid-year results and further reinforced in our end-of-year evaluation, published in September here. Similarly, our partnership with Rwanda’s Ministry of Education (MINEDUC)- “RisingFaster” via Elimu-Soko - delivered a second year of positive results. These results were presented at the 2024 FLEX conference in Kigali.
This video featuring John, a public school student in Sierra Leone, showcases the real impact the FasterMath program has had on his understanding and love of math.
4. A landmark moment for education in Liberia.
June was an action-packed month for Rising. The month kicked off with a historic moment for education in Liberia: the Honourable Minister of Education, Dr Jarso Maley Jallah, committed direct financial support for the Liberian Education Advancement Program (“LEAP” formerly “PSL”) in her 2024 Education Budget.
Many initiatives come and go, but most are never truly designed or owned by the government. That’s not the case with LEAP, which started its 9th academic year this September. The decision of the Hon. Minister to commit funding from the national education budget was hugely symbolic. It demonstrates not only the government’s ongoing commitment to LEAP but also their commitment to building an education ecosystem where testing innovative solutions is encouraged and taken forward. Read more here.
5. Rising Academy Waterloo was named a World’s Best School!
At the beginning of the year we entered one of our schools, Rising Academy Waterloo, into T4 Education’s World’s Best School Prize in the ‘Overcoming Adversity’ category.
After a rigorous application and interview process, Rising Academy Waterloo school was shortlisted in the Top 10 for a World’s Best Schools Prize, a first for a school in Sierra Leone. We were honoured to be joined by Hon. Conrad Sackey, Minister for Basic and Senior Secondary Education (MBSSE), who made the big announcement to the school and the entire Waterloo community. In his address, Minister Sackey shared his experience of Rising Academy Waterloo - "What I have felt going through the corridors of this school is a learning culture… It is a blend of what I call the traditional structured pedagogy, blended with the use of technology. It is a unique combination."
In September, we were thrilled to see Rising Academy Waterloo progress in the competition and reach Top 3 in their category. With this, Rising Waterloo became the only school from the continent still in the running for a World’s Best School Prize across the 5 prize categories. Following the Top 3 announcement, we were honoured to receive congratulatory messages from the Chief Minister of Sierra Leone David Sengeh, as well as David Lammy MP and Tony Blair.
Watch this video to find out more about Rising Academy Waterloo school, its remarkable School Leader, Alpha Kamara, and the journey of the Waterloo community.
6. Together we celebrated 10 years of Rising!
We wrapped up June in style with our Rising@10 celebration event in Freetown, Sierra Leone! The celebration brought together senior government leaders, including Hon. Minister Conrad Sackey and the Mayor of Freetown, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr OBE, funders, implementing partners, students, parents, alumni and Rising staff from across our organisation. We marked the occasion in true Rising style and felt truly honoured by the show of support for our 10 year milestone.
7. Our private school students in Sierra Leone and Ghana achieved strong public exam results.
We were thrilled to see our Rising private schools achieve top results on the primary and secondary school public exam. For the fourth consecutive year, private schools in Sierra Leone achieved a 100% pass rate on the National Primary School Examination (NPSE). Rising Academy Waterloo was the top performing school in their district on the NPSE, as well as the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) for students completing junior secondary and on the West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE) for students completing senior secondary. In Ghana, our students achieved our highest results on the BECE of the past 5 years and showed fantastic progress from the prior year.
8. We launched our newly redesigned core curriculum.
In September we were excited to launch our newly redesigned core curriculum for English and Math. At Rising, we take an iterative approach to development and work closely with our schools and teaching teams to ensure the content meets the needs of teachers and students. We were delighted to put our newly redesigned content in the hands of thousands of teachers and students to kick off the new school year. And we were even more thrilled by their response! In our Ghana Education Outcomes Project (GEOP) in Northern Ghana, teachers have had their first experience of a partner seeking and incorporating their feedback, and they’re now deeply invested in their new teaching and learning materials.
9. Rising signed a new MoU with the Ministry of Education in Rwanda to extend the “RisingFaster” program to more schools.
Following two years of impressive, cost-effective results in the pioneering Elimu-Soko pilot, we were thrilled to announce an expanded partnership with Rwanda's Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) in November. This new MoU will see our literacy and numeracy program, RisingFaster, grow to reach 120 schools and impact over 60,000 students in the coming year. Find out more here.
10. Rising led the way in the Year 2 evaluation of the Sierra Leone Innovation Challenge.
We are delighted to be wrapping up 2024 on a high note with the recent announcement of the Year 2 results for the Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge (SLEIC). Results showed significant gains in learning across the program, with students in Rising partnership schools making even greater improvement.
In Math, students in Rising schools improved by 0.36 standard deviations compared with 0.29 at the program-level. In literacy, Rising was the top performer by a significant margin, delivering 0.33 SD of improvement. Beyond learning gains, Rising also achieved the highest overall teacher and student attendance. These results are especially encouraging following the recent release of the National Learning Assessment results for Grade 4 students across Sierra Leone. According to the report, “almost all pupils do not, without support, have a foundation for future success - 95% in English and 98% in Math”. Find out more here.
Big thanks to all of our partners and supporters who have been alongside us over the past 10 years and have been so crucial to our growth. We want to extend an extra special thank you to Paul Skidmore, who transitioned from CEO to Exec Chair at the start of September. Paul’s visionary leadership has been instrumental in building Rising to where we are today. We’re also deeply grateful for all of our brilliant colleagues at Rising, past and present, and all the ways in which they have made Rising who we are today, and who we are becoming going forward.
We wish you all a happy holiday season with friends and family, and look forward to a fantastic 2025 together!