Making Ghanaian Girls Great! is a project delivering expert education from the country’s capital to remote places using virtual teaching in the classroom.
Deprived regions in Africa often lack the money or resources to offer students basic education, and initiatives such as Ideas Box are already providing disconnected communities with books, e-readers and tablets. Taking a different tack, Making Ghanaian Girls Great! (MGCubed) is delivering expert education from the country’s capital to remote locations using virtual teaching in the classroom.
MGCubed was created to address the challenges of teacher absenteeism, teacher quality and poor student learning in Volta and Greater Accra in Ghana. The United Kingdom’s Varkey Foundation turned to video conferencing technology to offer a solution. The pilot, funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), which began in 2013 and scheduled to operate until 2017, is Ghana’s first interactive distance-learning project.
MGCubed lessons are broadcast live to multiple classrooms by six master teachers from two teaching studios in Accra.
Every day, using basic video conferencing and microphones in the classroom, students receive two hours of interactive, two-way education in maths and English. The project has equipped two classrooms in 72 Ghana Education Service primary schools, helping around 8,000 girls gain access to an education they otherwise couldn’t get. The project has especially focused on young girls aged seven to 16 living in deprived communities.
The participating schools are equipped with a webcam, computer and satellite that mainly run on solar energy to minimize costs. On location, there’s a local helper with teaching and computer skills to provide guidance for the kids. Over 144 facilitators were trained in modern teaching techniques to support the programme. After school, there’s also a special ‘Wonder Woman club’ broadcast for to up to 50 marginalized girls per school, where female role models are featured and students get the opportunity to participate in a question and answer session.
The initial results from the pilot are very positive: between 2014 and 2015, average attendance for girls at MGCubed classes increased from 54 per cent to just under 80 per cent, and all the girls surveyed thought positively about the teaching they received.
As a result, Innovations for Poverty found that the project had significantly improved the girls’ learning, with the most significant progress made by girls in the lowest grade. MGCubed’s own data confirms the improvement, with an average increase of almost 25 per cent in mathematics test scores. Progress in English was less substantial, but there was still an improvement in the words per minute reading measure for the lowest-performing students, and on reading comprehension for students overall.
The project, and especially the Wonder Woman club, has also helped improve the girls’ self-esteem. In an analysis of over 130 girls’ feedback, more than half of them proactively identified that these after-school sessions had had a major effect on their confidence and self-respect, their desire to avoid early marriage and pregnancy, and personal hygiene.
Girls who attended the Wonder Women sessions were also significantly more likely to disagree with the statements ‘I think that I am a failure’ and ‘I do not have much to be proud of’. When asked, ‘If a mother wants to buy school items for her children but their father does not agree, should she go ahead and buy them?’ they were more likely to answer ‘Yes’. The girls were also more likely to express a desire to attend university or gain higher education.
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Website: www.varkeyfoundation.org/content/making-ghanaian-girls-great
Contact: www.varkeyfoundation.org/contact-us
Company name: GEMS Education Solutions
Innovation name: Making Ghanaian Girls Great!
Countries: Ghana; United Kingdom
Industries: Education / Non-profit & social cause