Sustainable Education & Enterprise Development (SEED) has formally launched the first of its kind Digital School Transformation Platform in Nigeria.
The initiative which was powered by Sophia ERP was announced today, January 23, 2020 in Acceler8 Hub, Ikeja, Lagos.
Speaking to news men at the press conference, the Executive Director, Sustainable Education & Enterprise Development (SEED), Olanrewaju Oniyitan, noted that SEED had come up with SEED Quality Assessment Tool (SQAT), an innovative school development and continuous improvement tool to assess the quality of under-resourced schools.
She explained that the SQAT was devised to provide a pathway for improvement to the low-income schools in Lagos, by helping school leaders understand their strengths and weaknesses. And also providing them with critical information to start their journey of school transformation.
According to her, SEED which started skeletally in 2016, had her first intervention to schools with a team of four in Ikeja and Ojo local government areas of Lagos state and were able to reach 51 schools.
We had to come up with SQAT, as a framework to checkmate improvement as a school and also as a business in these low-income schools. However, it was a very rigorous process as we had to carry huge files about to these schools to assess them. And even though our cost of trainings were really subsidized, the people still had to really stress themselves, spend excessively on transport to come from very far distance to undergo training, she said.
Speaking further, she informed that they were able to upscale to 715 schools after receiving grant funding. And thus, managing the schools and their data became more challenging.
‘‘We already have to go through so much stress collecting data manually and also collating with the 51 schools but it even became more rigorous when we upscaled. Thus, when Sophia ERP came on board to help digitize the process, we immediately knew that we would be able to reach out to more schools,’’ she stated.
‘‘With the digitized medium, schools can go online to Seed Foundation Program to register and also assess themselves, before SEED comes to verify. The process becomes easier and everyone gets to benefit from it. Hence, we hope to ensure at least 10,000 schools with over 1,000,000 children benefit from support and resources to effectively improve the quality of their schools by 2030 in Africa, starting with Nigeria.’’ She added.
Also addressing the newsmen, the CEO of Sophia ERP, Conrad Adigwe, noted that Sophia ERP, an enterprise/digital transformation tech company, whose special focus was to accelerate growth for Small, Medium and Large African Businesses with cost effective and suitable technology solutions, was proud to partner with SEED to digitize the first transformation component, the SQAT.
Adigwe in a presentation, showed the newsmen the interface of the digital platform and walked them through the registration process in stages of application, with every detail needed well stated.
Responding to Edugist on the concern expressed over language barrier that may be encountered while registering, he informed that measures were being put in place as the platform keeps spreading to accommodate network lapses and language barrier.
With the intervention of the digital process, and our cloud base solution, schools can register and login from any part of the country. And after we have succeeded in our test pilot zone, the SQAT can also penetrate states and beyond, he stated.
Low-income schools were hereby encouraged to visit SEED FOUNDATION to register and be a beneficiary of this great initiative.
