Vikas Pota is the Chairman of the Varkey Foundation, a family foundation founded by Indian billionaire education entrepreneur Sunny Varkey that seeks to improve global teacher capacity and promote universal access to quality education. He launched the annual Global Education & Skills Forum (GESF), which has been widely described as the ‘Davos of Education’, and has run education projects in Uganda and Ghana.
Pota is also the Group CEO of Tmrw Digital, a holding company for various ed-tech related investments and companies owned by education entrepreneur Sunny Varkey. I recently had a conversation with him on the sidelines of the 2019 Global Education & Skills Forum where he talked about the challenges of education in Africa and proposed 5 ideas to innovate education on the continent.
Every year, the Varkey Foundation hosts the Global Education & Skills Forum which brings together world leaders from the public, private and social sectors and seeks solutions to achieve education, equity and employment for all. Eversince you hosted the first GESF in (2016?), what significant improvements have you seen in the global education space, particularly in regards to countries improving the quality, efficiency and access to basic education, and what is the forum looking to accomplish this year?
It is an unmitigated tragedy that in 2019 nearly 263 million young people are out of school worldwide. Of the 650 million primary school-age children that are in education, 250 million are not learning the basics.
Despite those big numbers not changing or actually getting worse, there are some notable developments taking place. UNESCO’s recent Global Education Monitoring report 2019, Migration, displacement and education: Building Bridges, Not Wallscited examples of where EdTech is starting to make a difference: a UNESCO teacher education project in Nigeria in association with Nokia; UNHCR and Vodafone’s Instant Network Schools programme reaching more than 40,000 students and 600 teachers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, South Sudan and the United Republic of Tanzania; NGO Libraries Without Borders and UNHCR’s Ideas Box package which has been shown to have a positive impact in two Burundi camps hosting Congolese refugees.
A global problem needs global solutions, real co-operation between countries and their governments, and to go deeper with more organizations at the granular level. So GESF 2019 will once again feature leading personalities from the public, private and social arenas, including over five former Presidents and Prime Ministers and 40 Education Ministers. This year, they will be joined by a new generation of change-makers, including grassroots activists, philanthropists, tech developers and many more, that are shaping the world with new voices, new ideas and new technologies. By sharing their stories we can have a much smarter debate about how to solve these challenges on a global scale.
We in the education community must learn from these people. For example, we will hear from Kennedy Odede, the social entrepreneur who founded Shining Hope for Communities to fight urban poverty and gender inequality in Nairobi’s slums. And we are honoured to have with us Bana Alabed, the nine-year-old Syrian girl who has documented the siege of Aleppo – with its airstrikes, hunger, danger, and displacement – for the whole world to see.
GESF 2019 will also, once again, host the Next Billion Prize, which recognizes leading EdTech startups making an impact on education in low income and emerging economies. This year we’re also proud to be holding our first Philanthropy Summit, which will see over 50 grant making foundations from around the world meeting to share ideas on how to give every child access to a quality education.
Why is Africa in focus this year at the GESF?
The global education crisis is most keenly felt in Africa. That is why there is a particularly prominent focus on it this year at GESF. We are likely to miss the SDGs on education, but there are some exciting EdTech solutions coming on stream now which can play a role in changing the situation.When you look at UN Sustainable Development Goal 4- to provide a better standard of education for everyone - if we are to have any chance of getting near that we need to recruit 69 million more teachers by 2030.
To discuss these challenges we are delighted to welcome at GESF 2019 honoured guests including Education Ministers and government representatives such as Matthew Opoku Prempeh from Ghana and Armina Mohamed from Kenya. They will meet EdTech and online learning community leaders to debate how EdTech can enable access to education and promote social and learning impact. One of our debate sessions asks if Africa can leapfrog to lead the EdTech revolution owing to the level of innovation that Sub-Saharan Africa is currently witnessing. In another panel Saaid Amzazi, Minister of Education for Morocco, will be discussing improving education across the Middle East and North Africa with his counterpart from Palestine. One of our main change makers giving his vision for the future will be Sierra Leone’s President Julius Maada Bio. Rosemary Seninde, Minister of Education in Uganda, will join her counterparts in debating new changes in education across Sub-Saharan Africa.
There will be a session on how to get girls into STEM subjects where they are currently under-represented, Amy Ogan of Carnegie Mellon University, will be exploring how AI can go beyond barriers to help a generation of young learners in Africa gain literacy, Javier Arroyo the EdTech entrepreneur and founder of the Smartick adaptive afterschool maths programme using AI to study a child’s learning style and adapt to their needs will be giving his views on how EdTech can change the world. We will also be debating how the EdTech ecosystem succeeds in China with three hugely successful Chinese Edtech ‘unicorns’ and entrepreneurs – Dun Xiao of 17zuoye; Zhuang Chen of New Oriental and Bill Ning of Blue Elephant – sharing their stories. Professor Candice Odgers of the University of California Irvine will be leading a discussion on the effect of smartphones and other mobile technology on children, Professor Paige Harden of the University of Texas will be talking about how our genes can determine educational success and globally famous Pulitzer Prize nominee Steven Pinker will be talking about how demystifying the science behind human language can help.
This tremendous focus on technology is part of our belief that it is truly something that could breach the educational divide and solve so many of those big problems and challenges, if it is able to realize its full potential.
We also have to take into account the need to find jobs for the more than one billion young people who will join the global workforce over the next decade, at the same time as automation is on the rise and threatening to simply ‘delete’ many of the physical and routine tasks. To accommodate this and ensure the young are properly taught and also trained for the future, we need an education revolution. As the impact of automation will hit developing economies within the next twenty years, we are short of time. Surviving the rise of the robots will really need the public, private and voluntary sectors in education to work together much more closely — which in some cases is politically uncomfortable for governments. It will certainly need policy makers in the developing world to prioritise education over many other pressing demands on their treasuries.
Whilethere is no doubt that we’re going to need the technology to meet the sheer scale of the challenge of providing every child with access to a quality education, I’m also a pragmatist. So I know we need a much better understanding of how technology can improve educational outcomes. I got my first real wake up call to this back in 2015 when the OECD published their report “Students, Computers and Learning: Making The Connection” which said that even countries which had invested heavily in information and communication technologies (ICT) for education had seen no noticeable improvement in their performances in PISA results for reading, mathematics or science. So we need to be realistic about what technology can and cannot do. For instance, technology will never replace teachers in my view, because their empathy, ability to encourage and care as well as their ability to deliver instantaneous personalized learning cannot be surpassed by machines.
Delivery of quality education in Africa has been a challenge for successive governments on the continent, and many argue that the current education system in Africa uses outdated methods and is not preparing children for the future. Why is this case, and off the top of your head, what are a 5 ideas you have for innovating education in Africa?
All things are teacher related – if we pay them well, resource them well and treat them well then we will get good and outstanding education results in our schools and colleges. It’s a very mixed picture in Africa, but the importance of the teacher pay, respect and results equation is borne out there. The Varkey Foundation’s detailed and worldwide research published in the Global Teacher Status Index 2018showed that in Ghana teacher status ranked the fourth lowest of any country surveyed - 32nd out of 35 - while Ghanaians had among the least respect for teachers of any of those countries and teacher status in Uganda was the eighth lowest of the 35 countries.
Parental engagement is critical - especially when it comes to making sure girls are sent to school, but, according to UNICEF, globally 264 million children and adolescents do not have the opportunity to enter or complete school and 27 million children are out of school in conflict zones. So it’s no exaggeration to say we have a global education crisis, and of course this is most keenly felt in Africa and other countries in the developing world.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers as many promising and transformative solutions for education as it does for other aspects of society, now and in the immediate future. According to people like consultants McKinsey and Princeton’s head of computer science Jennifer Rexford, it will revolutionize what teachers teach and how they teach it. I believe it will be vital to teach students about not just computer coding but also how to design AI algorithms for a wide variety of functions and purposes. This will equip them with some of the key skills they will need and benefit from during their adult lives.
We have to start holding governments accountable for the election manifesto promises they make. This means when they promise big investments or ring-fenced spending on education, we ensure they live up to that. It is all too easy for politicians to change their minds and make short-term decisions reacting to unforeseen circumstances or for the sake of political expediency, whereas education investment by necessity needs to be deep and long-term and we all have a duty to do our utmost to speak out and protect it when we see it under any kind of threat. We simply need better system leadership across the board in every country – leaders who have a granular understanding of the important role education plays in society and how vital it is for the economy, the environment and everyone’s future – combined with the courage to spend big on it, ensuring that investment is embedded in a correct and sustainable way. According to UNESCO, of all regions, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of education exclusion. Over one-fifth of children between the ages of about 6 and 11 are out of school, followed by one-third of youth between the ages of about 12 and 14. UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics data shows almost 60% of youth between the ages of about 15 and 17 are not in school. Clearly we need to turn this around and the main responsibility starts at the top.
Ultimately though we need more and better collaboration to really solve this. Ensuring every child is given a good education is everyone’s responsibility. To do this we must bring together the best from all sectors of society, including NGOs, the private sector, business, science, media and entertainment, every sector in fact, to effectively strengthen public education systems. Actually we find everyone wants to help and it's really just a matter of putting ideology to one side and placing the best interests of the student at the centre of all we do. It is important we gain the perspective of business in this debate, after all, they have an enormous stake in ensuring new entrants to the workforce are going to be increasingly better educated and trained with all the 21stcentury skills needed to ensure progress and forward momentum. We engage those who are innovating by mentoring teachers, serving on governing bodies, and helping build careers advice capabilities.
What role can technology play in education, especially in Africa and developing countries in general?
We are very conscious that technology can play one of the most vital roles in education, particularly in Africa, where it can make all the difference. The Varkey Foundation launched Train for TomorrowAfrica’s first live two-way interactive distance learning teacher-training programme. The project was the first dedicated teacher training programme in Africa to make use of satellite enabled schools, solar powered computer hardware and an interactive live feed inside the classroom, enabling high quality two-way interactive training to be delivered at regular intervals on a large scale.
So while in Ghana for instance, there are no computers, TVs or smartphones in many rural schools and a history of classroom practice based on no formally training, We're trying to leapfrog what they should have received when they first became teachers by providing the latest and most cutting-edge classroom pedagogy that is available.
Also you can overcome teacher shortages by providing online courses. UNESCO’s Digital services for education in Africa report shows that ICT in education in general, and mobile learning in particular, offers various benefits including access to low-cost teaching resources, added value compared to traditional teaching and a complementary solution for teacher training.
Large class sizes often result in fairly impersonal delivery by teachers – they struggle when the numbers are against them. In Ethiopia, for instance, class sizes there reached 64 at one point. But with tech teaching tools you actually have the potential to teach every child at their own pace and deliver truly personalized learning.
Using tools like Skype, teachers are increasingly able to have global discussions between their students and those in other countries to get a real insight into how their counterparts in other countries live. This is a great way to promote global citizenship and competitiveness.
One of our Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize finalists Michael Soskil over in Pennsylvania in the US, has used multimedia technology to facilitate emotional connections among his students through distance learning service projects. They have taken part in a maths-Swahili video skills exchange with children in Kenya and raised $12,000 for water filters for children at school in Kibera slum, Nairobi. Michael is co-author of the Mystery Skype notebook, a game that links up classrooms around the world. Students are encouraged to ask each other questions to work out their locations and learn about somewhere new.
So there are many ways that technology is a real force for good in sustaining and improving education in Africa and other parts of the world too.
GESF brings big Hollywood stars and world leaders to the event, who can we expect this year? How does the presence of celebrities aid the cause of raising profile and issues around education?
Once again, as well as some of the biggest names in politics and policy, we have some stars of stage and screen as well as the world of sports and entertainment, to bring a real touch of glamour and occasion to GESF, The Global Teacher Prize and our very first Global Teacher Prize Concert. It’s a sad fact of life that the education challenges and needs are not at the top of the global news agenda. But when you bring ‘star power’ to bear and many celebrities from various walks of life come to GESF and share their experiences and hopes for the teaching profession, that sprinkling of magic and stardust inevitably creates really helpful headlines around the world. It helps carry the debate forwards and give it real prominence.
If we are to really solve the education challenges facing the planet it does need everyone to get involved, and this also means celebrities, stars and big names stepping up to do their bit. When we ask them, they are always keen. It just goes to show there is a real appetite right across society to do much more in the cause of education.
We also believe that teachers are real stars in our society because of the impact they have on young lives and the good that they do. Therefore it is right that they are celebrated in a lavish Oscars style ceremony for all the world to see and enjoy. Teachers matter and with so many prominent people coming together in one place to celebrate them, it’s a most powerful demonstration of this. So we have some fantastic big names and personalities taking part again this year – most of which are kept under wraps until the weekend itself. We just don’t want to spoil the surprise.
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