203 – Developing Pan-African Digital Maths Textbooks and its Challenges

[00:00:06] David: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. I’m David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS, and it’s my pleasure to be here today with Michael Obiero, longtime collaborator, and president of the Kenyan Math Society, lecturer at Maseno University, many other accolades.

But today we are talking about textbooks. We’ve had an episode around this before, but you’ve just launched a campaign, or maybe the correct way to frame it is that a UK charity has just launched a campaign to support the work that a team you are supervising is doing in Kenya. Do you want to tell us about this work?

[00:00:49] Mike: Thank you so much, David, it’s a pleasure to be having a conversation with you again. Indeed, we’ve collaborated for quite some time. And IDEMS has supported so many initiatives in Kenya over the years, especially in regards to improving education. So Kenya, as any other African or developing countries, encounter different challenges because of the improvements that the governments are trying to do to address emerging economic and social challenges in the society.

So, from 2017, the government implemented a new curriculum, which is the competency-based curriculum (CBC). And it was supposed to address the issues of unemployment, to catch up with the digital revolution going around, and to instill a sense of nationhood, as well as give students practical skills. The ideas are excellent, the only challenge we have is the implementation.

[00:01:57] David: Wait a second. You framed this very well in a number of ways, because I’m really glad you’ve highlighted that the ideas behind the competency-based curriculum, which many may not be aware of, these are actually, they’re cutting edge, they’re world leading. If implemented well, this could be transformational in very positive ways. But the implementation challenge, as you’ve put it, is the crux of the issue.

[00:02:25] Mike: Right. So as I mentioned, the ideas are great and my daughter is a pioneer of the CBC curriculum, the very, very first people to be exposed to the curriculum, and they’re now in grade nine doing a national exam. So next year they expected to go to grade 10. So, three years ago, the whole school system introduced as part of the implementation of the CBC curriculum, and that is the junior secondary school.

So this is not a school level that was there before. And the challenge at the time was first, where is this school level to be housed? Is it going to be at the secondary schools or the primary schools? So just a few months, two months to the new grade seven, the government decided that it will be housed in primary schools.

And because the primary school teachers are not trained to offer that curriculum at that level, the government was required to hire new teachers to support students in grade seven, which is the first grade of the junior secondary schools.

[00:03:40] David: Can I just come in here again because what you are describing, I’ve worked long enough in Kenya and other contexts like this broadly to understand how this happened. But I think for many listeners this will seem just shocking that the design of the new system, which was thought to be word leading, really, really good design didn’t take into account the practical realities of the schooling system.

[00:04:12] Mike: Yeah.

[00:04:12] David: Now, where the failure lies, I don’t want to dig into those details, but the point is to have a new type of school created from scratch was just never going to happen. It was just not within the realms of what could possibly be implemented. And so, the nature of this change was always going to cause this sort of rift when it first happened.

[00:04:40] Mike: Sure, yeah.

[00:04:41] David: This was avoidable in many different ways, but it was in other ways inevitable.

[00:04:47] Mike: Of course.

[00:04:49] David: The nature of this shift and the disruption this causes, is unimaginable to people outside of these environments. This is how big societal change often happens in lower resource environments. The consequences of it can have terrible impact for many individuals, but the system as a whole needs to change and therefore it changes. And that’s broadly what happened.

And now, as it’s evolving, correct me if I’m wrong, a few years on, within the primary schools, you are getting a division which is happening because more staff have been recruited into what the junior secondary school would be. And you are getting these divisions forming where over time you will now have two separate schools emerging from that primary school, one will be the junior secondary, which will be independent, a separate head of school, and the rest of it from the primary.

But this was not there before that transition happened, and the way that the first students to go through this, it was unimaginable that you could actually have this transition at that point in time.

[00:06:06] Mike: True. The way the government works is that if it’s been approved, something is to be implemented, it has to be implemented irrespective of the enormous challenges to implementation. And so it’s upon the schools, the local education leaders to figure out ways of mitigating these challenges.

And some of the immediate challenges were that the government could only hire a maximum of two teachers per school at the start. And these are teachers who are trained in specific subjects, but because they are the only qualified teachers, now they’re expected to teach all subjects across board.

So if you have teachers who are trained in humanities, then they’re also expected to teach sciences. In some cases, in some extreme cases, we had primary school teachers now required to teach secondary school mathematics. But they’re not qualified to do that because of their training.

Again, there was a challenge of resources, which is still a challenge even now, that because of the large student teacher ratio, because of the small number of teachers per school, now teachers were not in a position to adequately address the needs of the students in terms of feedback, in terms of personalized attention.

These are challenges that needed to be addressed in order to give these students some semblance of a quality education. 

[00:07:40] David: Let me step back because you sort of had a quite extreme statement there, some semblance of equality education. The truth is, there are schools in Kenya that have navigated this well. They are the minority, but they have succeeded at turning this around, implementing the curriculum well, and that has required either great foresight from the school leadership or whatever it is, or real sacrifices from the teachers to actually manage this. There are wonderful cases on the ground of the navigation of these challenges actually leading to good education.

[00:08:21] Mike: Of course. And most of these schools are private schools, and private schools, they, in some sense, they foresee the challenges coming and they have to adhere to the government regulations or requirements to be given licensing. So they have to have the right number of teachers qualified. So for them, it’s something they have to do to get the licensing.

So it was not such a problem for private schools because to be given a license, you have to meet all these conditions, you must have labs, you must have teachers, and you must verify that you do have those requirements in place. That was not the case for most public schools.

And public schools, which are in urban areas, again, are slightly better placed because of basically a resource allocation, so some of them are slightly better resourced. But if you go to rural areas, some of the marginalised areas, these are some of the extreme cases where a lot of help needed to be put to those schools.

[00:09:29] David: You’ve set the background and the scene quite well for the fact that this is an urgent need, this is a really difficult to imagine situation, and broadly, it was about a year ago, just over a year ago, there was this workshop in Kenya, which was a big deal actually.

It was the first American Institute of Mathematics workshop, which was bringing together cutting edge researchers in the US with educators, mathematicians, mathematics educators from across Africa, but particularly centered on Kenya. And it was looking at electronic assessment.

You’ve been very heavily involved in that, and you got a grant from the US Embassy to build from this collaboration and try to address this problem through textbooks.

[00:10:22] Mike: So, first it was not really a grant for textbooks. The grant was to have a parallel workshop to the AIM workshop where we were bringing in early career researchers and students basically to learn from the more experienced professionals. But the grant came in late and so we had to think of another project that was aligned to the initial proposal.

And looking at the challenges that were going on in the education system, and because of the experiences I had learned through the workshop, because it’s through the workshop that I met the PreTeXt developers, that’s the technology to write textbooks, I met developers of STACK, the technology for writing assessment material, and some of the developers of WebWork, American technology for assessment as well.

And so with these ideas in mind and with the challenges we had, it became sort of obvious that trying to address the challenge of education at junior secondary school level through textbooks, not just textbooks, digital textbooks that will support both the students and teachers, especially in regards to assessment and feedback, will be a good way of trying to mitigate some of the education challenges, especially in mathematics and then eventually on the sciences.

Another reason to inform us of the digital textbooks was that at the start of the CBC implementation, the government started a project of sending tablets to schools, and this was to primary schools. The initiative was called one child, one computer, I think, started by president Uhuru Kenyatta. Most primary schools where the junior secondary school is housed, have some form of technologies or devices to access the digital textbooks.

So the initial thinking was that if we develop the digital textbooks, then they could be used on those devices that most schools have. So that’s where the idea of textbooks came in, and we were able to convince the US Embassy, which gave us the grant, that this is a worthwhile initiative, and they agreed to support that initiative.

[00:12:49] David: Let me just clarify. You were able to convince them that building inclusive textbooks to enable the access to everyone was a worthwhile use of this sort of funding that you had.

[00:13:00] Mike: Right.

[00:13:02] David: And there’s something in that language, which is quite important. The inclusivity of the textbook became your downfall.

[00:13:12] Mike: So the nature of the project was that, because the funding came from the US government, it was supposed to build collaboration between the Kenyan partners and the American community. So we got support from the American community in terms of training on WebWork, training on PreTeXt textbook authoring, and we were able to start the project in October 2024.

But as you put it, the funding came from the US government, at that time there was a change of government, president Trump was elected and there was a shift in priorities from the US government side. And so most of the projects which are not aligned to the new ideas the government wanted were sort of stopped.

[00:14:05] David: I think it was simpler than that. Diversity, equity, inclusion became taboo words. And so because you were developing inclusive textbooks, your project got cancelled halfway through.

[00:14:18] Mike: Yes. 

[00:14:20] David: And you’ve been struggling ever since. And I do want to just come back to the fact that this collaboration with US partners, and it was particularly the PreTeXt group. And I think it’s worth saying, why build on PreTeXt technologies? Well, because they are the forefront of what’s possible, what they’ve done in terms of innovation, it’s not widely known yet, but it’s so powerful.

They have a tagline, which is author once publish multiple times, and it’s this idea that you can have the same content authored, which can then produce a PDF to go offline, it can be published into an online textbook in HTML, it could be published into an offline textbook, which could be within other technologies, all authored once. This is so important.

[00:15:11] Mike: Or even in braille, to address people who are physically impaired. So it was this advantages that PreTeXt has, and looking at the Kenya society and how we envision students to access the textbooks, I think PreTeXt became the obvious technology to use.

[00:15:32] David: I do want to just reinforce this. This inclusivity was genuine, you know, you were looking for a technology which would enable this to be published in ways that would be accessible to all. 

[00:15:45] Mike: Yes. 

[00:15:46] David: This isn’t possible or this isn’t easy in other ways. If you were to do this using other technologies, then you’d need to make a special effort to create the braille version. Whereas by using PreTeXt, that comes basically for free. It’s not for free, it means you need to author well.

And so there is a cost which you are doing, which is relatively minimum, which is learning how to author in a way where the translation of this content into the different contexts for deployment, be it braille, be it print, be it interactive, this is all built in to the system.

And that’s why PreText is so powerful. It’s an open source system, which means that this is sustainable for you, but didn’t meet your needs because you were looking at WebWork, but you already had a lot of experience with STACK, and your assessment in the end was that actually STACK is what you needed to get the learning opportunities you wanted for the students.

And so what I’m so proud of you for in a sense on this is that you didn’t accept second best. You then pushed and said, we need this integration. And the open source communities, and we’ve played a role in supporting this, but it’s only possible because both PreTeXt and STACK engaged with Georg, from our team, who put in the work and who have now made that possible.

You are driving the development of the technologies further, you are forcing us to develop the technologies you need.

[00:17:27] Mike: I’ll take you back a few steps. PreTeXt is developed basically in the US, so it’s very much developed and used in the US. WebWork as well is widely used in the US. So, these are the two technologies that, from the US perspective, they work pretty well together. That’s why initially we were looking at PreTeXt, WebWork, and because of the experience I have with STACK, we were looking at STACK as well.

And in the course of writing the textbooks, and because of some of the superior advantages that STACK offers, it became apparent that we needed to have STACK working with PreTeXt. This is something that was not there before. So STACK is very well developed in Europe, and we’ve used STACK because of the support we have from the STACK community. I have to again appreciate the support we got from the PreTeXt community. That’s why we’re able to start using PreTeXt pretty quickly.

One of the topics that was discussed during the AIM workshop was interoperability of some of these systems. You have PreTeXt system, you have STACK system, you have other system as well. So how can we make these systems operate seamlessly to support users? Because they’re open source systems, it will be very easy for users if these systems operate seamlessly together.

And so when we started using PreTeXt to develop the textbooks, we started also developing STACK questions separately. Because we didn’t have the interoperability in place, these were two separate entities. But again, with the support of IDEMS, now we are in a position where we can demonstrate the integration of STACK into PreTeXt, and how this would benefit students.

So, from the African side, because we are basically not developers, but we are users, and from the interaction I’ve had with the STACK developers, they rely mostly on the feedback from users to see areas of improvement. So we were able to demonstrate that these are the things we need from these two technologies, that if they can work together, then we can come up with a superior tool for teaching and learning.

So having demonstrated that to PreTeXt and to STACK, the two communities started working together. And I have to appreciate the role IDEMS has played in bringing the two communities together, I’ve talked to Chris and he is shifting most of his effort to make sure that STACK works seamlessly with PreTeXt.

So it’s a small contribution we are making from the Africa community, trying to direct or to inform areas of development from these technologies.

[00:20:30] David: You are being modest here, it is not a small contribution. You personally have become extremely influential in actually making this happen. And the comment you made, which I want to pick up on, was that you are not developers, and it’s not quite that simple.

It’s that you personally don’t have time to be the developer. You could be, you don’t have time. And it wouldn’t be the best use of your time because you are busy solving other issues. And so actually the truth of this is, you are using us, you are using the STACK people, you are using the PreTeXt people to actually make sure that the technologies are built to serve your goals.

And that’s great. That’s absolutely appropriate that we are serving your needs. And what’s so interesting for me, I’ve been a little enabler on this, sort of supporting it, allowing us to invest time in making this happen. But we’re not doing it just because it’s useful for you. We are doing it because this is important and useful full stop.

Since you have been the one pushing this, who made this happen, and I should say I’m a failure here, I’ve wanted PreTeXt and STACK to be integrated for almost a decade. PreTeXt doesn’t exist for quite a decade yet, it’s around 10 years old now, but since the beginning I was pushing for these integrations.

Since 2019, I’ve been emailing the PreTeXt team to say, could we integrate with STACK? And it’s never happened. It is your driving force which has made this happen, and now that collaboration has gone and it’s become something much more because there’s now a set of people who are involved in the PreTeXt work, who are exposed to STACK, who are seeing the value and appreciating the value of these together.

And it’s now not just useful for you, it is useful full stop. There’s a couple of groups in the US now building PreTeXt textbooks where they’re embedding STACK questions. This is the sort of things where over the next few years, my guess is this integration is just going to become, well, it is bringing the two best technologies together for the jobs at what they do. What you’ve been doing is actually providing that leadership, and this is what’s so important.

[00:22:59] Mike: I think what was missing was a demonstration of why having the integration was important, the appreciation of why it was important was the missing link. And once you are able to demonstrate that, look, we are using STACK, this is the revolutionary change STACK has done for us, and we have demonstrated that.

We are leading the drive of integrating STACK in university education mathematics teaching and assessment, we’ve demonstrated the usefulness of STACK. We again demonstrated why having digital textbooks would be an important tool, especially at junior secondary school level.

So you have these two tools, which are extremely important. So why not integrate them so that you have the two working together to offer this amazing tool for teaching and assessment. So that’s what we’ve done from our perspective, we’ve demonstrated that these are very important tools. The only missing link is that they’re not working together. Can you make them work together so that we don’t have to worry about disjointed access of the tools?

[00:24:20] David: Absolutely. And this broader drive to interoperability, this is just pushing people in the direction they’re wanting to go, which is great.

[00:24:27] Mike: Yeah.

[00:24:28] David: But I want to come back to the fact that there was a moment, it was more than just demonstrating this, because there was a moment where you were sort of saying, look, we are authoring this, this is going to happen, get on and make it happen. You are being very polite about your role in this. Your role was more forceful. 

[00:24:50] Mike: I have to be polite, I’m getting free labour from everyone!

[00:24:54] David: Well, I understand, but the simple truth is you have been quite forceful at pushing this. You said, look, we need to launch these textbooks on this deadline, that integration needs to work. Without that push, which was a hard push, this would’ve happened much more slowly.

It would’ve been a lot more careful, maybe a lot more rigorous because we’re still building up some of the bugs with the issues in different ways, but it would’ve been a lot slower because the urgency your context gave us, pushed us to develop the things and integrate the things which would otherwise have been happening at a very slow pace.

[00:25:31] Mike: True. And just to add on that, many developers try to get something perfect before it’s taken for use. In our context, we don’t have time to wait for something perfect to come about. And I think our communication was, give us something that’s working, we will work towards perfection as we use it.

So the feedback that comes from us using it will help you work towards making it perfect. And I think that gave them the confidence and the push to just get it done.

[00:26:06] David: And I think this point you are making is so important. Because the same is true, if we look at the campaign, which has just been launched, and we look at the initial video, I’m afraid my assessment is it’s far from perfect, but it is locally made by the local team who are doing this, and this is what they could do to get something off the ground to solve their problem. The textbook themselves, they’re far from perfect at this point in time.

[00:26:32] Mike: Of course.

[00:26:33] David: But your vision for this is that you don’t want them to be perfect before they get the teachers involved, ’cause you want the teachers to have ownership for the improvement process. 

[00:26:43] Mike: It’s the teachers who are going to make it perfect.

[00:26:47] David: For them to improve it and for them to actually have that ownership, it needs to be given to them in a state which is still a bit of a raw state.

[00:26:55] Mike: Yes.

[00:26:56] David: This very different concept of development and how to build these technologies than we have coming from higher resource environments. And I think it comes out of the nature of the systems you are working in. And it’s a really important learning because I do think that if you get this right and, you know, encouraging listeners, please get the campaign out there to support what they’re doing, even if we just take the third goal.

Your first goal is just to save the team. The second goal is to be able to continue until the next conference so that you can make the case. The third goal, which is £50,000, would enable you to do these iterations with teachers to start that process of creating that co-development with teachers so that the book is owned by the local teachers in terms of the content and how it’s done.

And all that’s happening for £50,000, it’s incredible what you are planning. Now, admittedly, the goals beyond that are a bit more ambitious and a bit more expensive, but we’ll come to that in a minute.

[00:28:01] Mike: If you look at how we started, we got a grant of 25,000 from the US Embassy, and they gave us about 15, which we started using, hired 10 interns, started to put structures in place. And then the grant was stopped, and we have interns we are working with, now we don’t have any money to support them, but the feeling is that it’s a worthwhile project. So we have to keep it going.

So you’re right by saying that the first goal is to save the team. The second goal is to get the books out there. And we are not looking at having something perfect because the ultimate goal is to have teachers involved in the development of the books. So we want teachers to take the responsibility of informing us what improvements we have to make to make the books address their needs and the needs of the students.

So we want teachers to take the ownership of the books. And that’s not the end goal. The end goal is to bring in now experts so that these books are at a gold standard, internationally recognised quality. And the reason for this is that we are not limiting the books for the Kenya context.

Most countries in Africa are adopting the competency-based curriculum and discussing with teachers from other countries, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Ghana, and so forth, they’re like, this exactly what we want. And you have the Ghana teachers using the books we are developing as a template for what they want to develop.

So, if we can get our books to a gold standard, then these books can either be adapted to different contexts. So that’s the ultimate goal, having these books to internationally recognised standards by experts so that other countries can feel confident in adapting or adopting the tools we are developing for our context.

So that’s the ultimate goal. It’s a bit ambitious, it will need a little bit more funding and little bit more involvement of experts to help us get there.

[00:30:07] David: Absolutely. I mean, if people look at the campaign, some of these bigger ambitions you have, have been articulated. Broadly your needs are, if you had that £50,000, we would, over the next year or so, have some amazing results that would come out as you go through these iterative cycles. It’s not much to ask for and it would really enable you.

But I think it’s worth us going into actually what have been articulated as some of the stretch goals, which you’ve sort of hinted at here. So the next goal beyond that 50,000 is ambitious. I think it’s been pitched at around £600,000. This is probably not gonna come from the crowdfunding, this will need somebody who really wants to see this happen to step in and make it happen.

This is where what you’ve discussed of having this gold standard textbook idea, this is what you envisage that you are not just wanting these open technologies, which are at the cutting edge of what they are to be delivering a good textbook. You want to actually flesh these out so that the open textbook system you’ve got is at the forefront of what’s possible.

And this is work that we are involved in, of course, we would be supporting this, we already have the collaborations with partners in different ways to say, well, okay, we need integration of our AI to be able to help with the actual validation process of student input so that you can have certain questions done better. We know that there’s a need to use these machine learning algorithms to be able to create personalised learning pathways through this, which exist within other systems.

These aren’t difficult to do. It’s just a question of being at the cutting edge of how we then have the question management to be able to get the better learning experience for students. It’s sort of known how to do this and there are expensive commercial systems that do this, and it’s not difficult for us to implement that within your open framework that you are building.

And then the main thing, which I’ve heard from you, which I think is so exciting, is these are things that we know need to be done and can be done. But the whole co-development process with teachers where we learn from the ground what would actually make this work for them.

That might be integration into a broader learning experience. A lot of these things already exist, but what do they need? That’s what you are looking to sort of define and co iterate to be able to create this technology. And if you put it in that context, you know, 600,000, this isn’t much, this is still cheap for what, actually, your ambition to do is, but you are ambitious.

And then your next level up was something like 2 million pounds. And if I understood correctly, that’s where you are already starting to have multiple countries, I think Ghana was included then. And the idea is that you would then actually have the formal randomised control trial studies, which demonstrate that this is leading to improved learning. You’re a researcher at heart, you want the evidence behind what you are doing.

[00:33:31] Mike: And that’s what the pilot study we are trying to implement next year is leading towards. Because we want to gather data that will inform the development and the implementation of the textbooks. And this is at every level, Kenyan schools are very diverse, so we want to cover at least the diversity of the schools in Kenya.

You have six grade levels, three in junior secondary, three in senior secondary. We want to work towards preparing teacher guides, so these guides for teachers to use to deliver the curriculum, so that’s another aspect of the books we want to address. And building a community of teachers who work towards developing the books, I think that’s a very important goal.

And having structures in place so that teachers can feel confident to contribute and to be recognised as contributors to development of the books, that’s another goal. So there are different aspects that we want to cover and we will need to gather data at every level that will inform the development of the books, the implementation of the books. And then you mentioned the technology aspect.

Again, it’s something we’ll have to think about. And so £600,000 was a modest amount for the next level. And even 2 million if you’re looking at schools across Africa, that’s still a very modest amount for that level of the project we’re envisioning.

And I think it’s informed by how we work. I work with an organization called INNODEMS, and over the years we’ve perfected the art of doing a bit much with the very modest amounts of money. So we try to have innovative ways of using the little amount of money we have to create impact or to demonstrate impact of what we’re doing.

So, we are not looking at throwing money at solutions, but having the least amount of money possible to demonstrate and create impact. And that’s because of sustainability. Africa, we don’t have the monies, so if you throw money at something once the money is cut, it means the intervention fails.

But working with modest amounts means that even in the absence of the money, we can have something still working. And that’s what we’re looking at.

[00:35:56] David: Absolutely. And I will just finish by sort of mentioning your big dream of this Pan-African approach to this. The big stretch goal within the campaign talks about, actually, these same technologies being studied in over six countries, built not for an individual environment, to work across environments.

I love the fact that you sort of need what happens in Kenya to still be happening in a modest way. But you need that network to be growing around you, studying this, you know, there’s proven models which show that these cooperative approaches to research and to learning lead to the synergistic approaches. You know, actually the cross pollination that we’ve talked about and used in the past across different initiatives across the continent, trying to solve the same problem in different contexts has been so beneficial.

And so, that’s the dream in some sense, that this is not a Kenyan initiative, this is a Pan-African initiative where it’s not just Pan-African for Africa, it’s a Pan-African initiative to show the way that everybody could be benefiting and could be building in these ways. It’s a really exciting vision.

[00:37:13] Mike: I like the way you frame it because you look at these technologies, they’re being used extremely different, in different ways, than how we are using it. You have STACK being used extremely differently in Europe, than how we are using it in Africa. You have PreTeXt being used in a different way in the US, and this was demonstrated in the last workshop I was privileged to be there with you. 

[00:37:36] David: We need to just mention this a little bit because we were together at Caltech, at an AIM workshop again, and it was a wonderful workshop. But I loved the discussion with you where you were shocked at how the collaboration was so different from the collaboration you are used to. Yes, there is collaboration here, but it’s very different to what you are used to. And that is just a consequence of the environment.

But what we agreed is that, actually, the sort of collaboration you are seeing and finding, growing out of Kenya to this Pan-African approach is very powerful. If only that type of collaboration could spread and help the textbook authors in the US, they would benefit. So it is not just that you are benefiting from the technologies they’re developing, they have a lot to learn and benefit from the societal mechanisms you have, the socio technological innovation that you are bringing about.

And this is, I think, one of the things that we were really excited that, you know, your role there and your voice has been so powerful and so interesting, and is so important.

[00:38:49] Mike: It’s demonstrating that in Africa we can’t afford to work in isolation, we have to work as a community, everyone has to be involved in the work we are doing. And so we tend to work as an encompassing community towards a project.

It was so different from the US perspective, and it’s born out of how our society works, the challenges we face, especially the financial challenges. Because we don’t have the finances as a small group working on this initiative, we have to bring everyone on board so that everyone’s contribution adds up in the project.

And my ultimate goal is to have teachers driving the initiative of developing the textbooks, teachers informing the respective government agencies that this is the tool we want to use for teaching because we are the developers, we are confident it addresses our needs and the needs of our students.

And if it has the gold standard, the international gold standard, then the government will be convinced that this is an international recognised tool. And because of that and because the teachers are driving the initiative, this is what we need to be using for our curriculum. So the ultimate goal is for teachers to inform the development of the tools they’re using for teaching.

We are starting with mathematics, but we’ll move towards other sciences and hopefully move towards other areas as well.

[00:40:33] David: Absolutely. You framed this as being driven by the challenges, but I think that’s underplaying the fact that, you know, across the continent there are cultures which are still strong, and those tend to be strong community, they tend to have elements of societal structures which lead to a different form of collaboration.

And so I think there’s more to it than just the response to the challenges being faced. And I think that’s probably a good place to end this sort of discussion, because I believe very strongly from the time I’ve spent, I’ve had the privilege of spending time in West Africa and East Africa, in many different communities to be embedded for long periods of time, to be working as a collaborator, serving groups like yourself, somebody you use, which I’m very happy to be used in this way.

But, the observation is critically that I’ve learned so much. There is so much to learn from the societal structures, from the sense of collaboration, that’s what I think is so important. And this is why I’m really hoping that one way or another we are able to sort of through the campaign or through other ways of trying to support this, I hope we see the big vision come to fruition, because I think this will be something which the world will learn from.

So really congratulations on the work you’ve done. Good luck on the work you are doing, and let’s hope to see what it will be, what fruit it will bear. 

[00:42:15] Mike: Thank you so much. I’m just so grateful for the support we have from IDEMS for the support we have from SAMI, the organisation leading the campaign from the UK. And my hope is that we can get the international community on board, not just support because that’s where we are now, we need the financial support to get us going, but also the technical expertise, the technological expertise you mentioned, these are some of the support we’ll need from the international community, even as we develop our own capacities. So thank you so much, I look forward to continued collaboration, I look forward to the campaign and let’s keep the project going.

So thank you so much, David.

[00:43:00] David: Thank you.