NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

By Yomi Kazeem

At the start of May, Bernice Sowole was trying to figure out a way to keep her mother’s 20-year old private secondary school alive.

Despite the easing of the coronavirus lockdown, the enduring ban on large public gatherings meant schools and religious organizations have remained shuttered given the obvious risk of students becoming vectors for spreading the virus.

But with a new school term approaching, like many other schools around the world, the Sowoles’ Lagos-based private school faced the risk of making no income despite mounting overheads, including rent and salaries. The solution was to hire a rapid-action team to digitize the entire term’s syllabus, across all subjects in the six grade levels, converting the lessons into videos that the school’s 350 pupils could access online. Put another way, Sowole’s solution meant the team had to transform all of the term’s planned classes into about a thousand 20-minute long video lessons within a month.

Photo courtesy of Stars Foundation.