“Wealth, if you use it, comes to an end; learning, if you use it, increases.” Swahili Proverb



An enduring lesson learnt throughout our 175-year existence is that, while things rapidly change around us, the things that truly matter don’t! The desire to keep learning and growing is one such thing that remains a driving force behind everything we do at Old Mutual. Education is central to this.



Responding to the Challenges



Aligned to both Sustainable Development Goal’s 4 (Quality Education) and 17 (Partnerships) as well as our Responsible Business philosophy, we’re working to share, connect, learn and grow together with the communities we serve through Education.



We believe in the power of Education to solve key social issues such as poverty, inequality and unemployment. By continuing to invest in Education today, we know that we can build a more prosperous future for the generations of tomorrow.



Old Mutual has partnered with authorities, experts, and practitioners in the field on a number of ongoing initiatives including: &nbsp;



<ul><li>Dynamic and interactive Financial Education and Inclusion programmes that have reached millions across the African continent. Utilising an array of channels and leveraging off technology, the programmes impart valuable and often life changing principles that empower customers and communities to build and sustain their lifetime financial goals.</li><li>Investing in Schools, Teachers and Leadership to drive immediate and long-term impact in the Education sector. Old Mutual’ s Education Flagship Project – a longer-term programme with a seven-year investment cycle – is in place to connect the dots between learners, teachers and school leadership through innovative training that has paid off in improved results in affiliated schools.</li></ul>



<ul><li>Skills Development interventions such as Bursaries, Internships, Learnerships and Graduate Development programmes that seek to create sustainable job opportunities and placements for learners.</li></ul>



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Introducing Africa’s Biggest Digital Classroom to Bring It All Together!



In perhaps our most ambitious move yet, Old Mutual has committed to building Africa’s Biggest Digital classroom so that we can extend the Education-based work already being done across the Group to so many more.



This Digital Classroom is being designed to respond to the challenges of widespread education exclusion, low Financial Literacy rates on the continent, vastly uneven teacher-to-learner ratios, as well as accessibility to physical and financial resources that continue to hamper the success of the delivery of Education on the continent today, and into the future.&nbsp;



Enabling Learning Through Digital Engagement



But why a digital classroom?



Our aim as a business, is to be able to effectively respond to an increasingly connected Africa with user-friendly, value-adding solutions and experiences that bring as many people along on this educational journey as possible. Designed with a generation of digital first, tech-savvy users in mind, but mindful of the wealth of knowledge coming through from past generations, Africa’s Biggest Digital Classroom will enhance the capabilities of past and present, to shape a brighter future for all well into the future.



While we’re investing in digital capabilities to enhance education across the continent, we know that the future of Africa is still its people! And Africa’s Biggest Digital Classroom has people at its core. We believe that in creating opportunities for people to share and connect using digital technologies, we can contribute to greater inclusivity and a more prosperous continent for all.



How You Can Participate



Work is already underway to establish Africa’s Biggest Digital Classroom. We will be creating opportunities for our employees, customers, teachers, learners and many other stakeholders to add their voices to the design process. You can follow our progress and add your voice to the conversation on social media using #175Africa



We look forward to working with you to bring Africa’s Biggest Digital Classroom online!



Content provided by Old Mutual

175 Digital Classroom Advertorial image 2 with 175 years logo

Building Africa’s Biggest Digital Classroom

John Schooling lived up to his name and loved working as a high school teacher. Quitting the classroom and becoming an entrepreneur in construction had nothing to do with not liking his job.
“It was 1984, and I was tired of being broke halfway through the month,” he says. “My best friend from school and I then set up our own business doing renovations and restoration jobs.”
The company grew from strength to strength, growing into a very successful construction and development company. When the global financial crisis shattered the world and shook South Africa, Schooling and his business partner were forced to reinvent themselves and their business model.
<div id="attachment_3806" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3806" class="size-medium wp-image-3806" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/004-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />STAG Student Lodging | Photography by Clare Louise Thomas</div>
“We had planned an upmarket residential development and a hotel on a stretch of land near District Six, in Cape Town. These plans were canned after banks pulled their money from our investors,” he says.
“We then found out that the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), situated near that particular stretch of land, was struggling with a student accommodation shortage of 6,000 beds. We did some further research and found out that the countrywide deficit of adequate student accommodation amounted to some 200,000 beds. We decided to tap into this market, giving way to the Student Accommodation Group or STAG African.”
Schooling’s statements are reflected in the Ministerial Review of SA University Accommodation, presented by the Department of Higher Education last year. The report shows a shortfall of 207,800 university beds, meaning that less than 10% of first-year university students can be accommodated on campus. The reality is much worse as the ministerial figures exclude the shortfall at tertiary education institutions other than universities, including so-called technical vocational education and training colleges.
“The deficit at these institutions may be as high as another 200,000 beds,” says Schooling, noting that the available on-campus residences, particularly in impoverished areas, are not always in tip-top shape. “These residences are often dilapidated, unhygienic and unsafe. It is apparently not uncommon for as many as six students to share a tiny room.”
Solving this issue is critical. Research has shown that first-year students, who have a roof over their head at university, have an 80% chance of passing. This is double the pass rate of those roughing-it without.
Fixing this problem is unfortunately an expensive affair. According to the government, is costs some $3.6 billion to provide a decent roof over the heads of all students in South Africa.
“This is the price tag when one builds with bricks and mortar,” says Schooling. “STAG African does things differently, as we use Light Steel Framing (LSF).”
This technique has been used in Europe and the United States for at least half a century. It uses galvanized steel structural wall frames, floor joints, roof trusses with single skin brick walls or fiber cement boards as wall cladding.
“Building a LSF structure is 40 percent quicker than building that same structure out of bricks and mortar. The process also requires significantly less energy, making LSF construction even more cost efficient,” says Schooling.
There is another reason why LSF structures are more energy efficient than conventional buildings.
“The wall cladding comprises material from renewable forests and fiber cement. As a result you need 80 percent less energy to warm up and cool down a building to maintain an ambient temperature. On top of that, we fit our buildings with LED lights and heat pumps, which reduces energy usage even more,” he says.
STAG African has built a roof over the heads of 1,055 students. Various other projects are in the pipeline, including a 2,046-bed residence at the University of Fort Hare, in Alice, and an extension of the residence at the University of Stellenbosch’s Tygerberg Medical Campus.
“The 208 additional beds we are building will make this the greenest residence in Africa,” says Schooling.
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Making way for energy efficient buildings is no luxury in South Africa, a country which faces a persistent energy crisis. Since 2008, the national power generator has struggled to meet the country’s energy demand. The power cuts are costing the economy up to $7.3 billion per month, according to the government.
While building decent, energy-efficient student residences, Schooling intends to create as many jobs as possible, particularly for young people. Data from the International Labour Organization (ILO) reveals that 52% of South Africans aged between 15 and 24 are neither at school, nor at work. As a result, 61.3% of all South Africans living in poverty are under the age of 25.
One of the main causes of the above scenario is a lack of skills. This is where STAG wants to come in.
“LSF building skills are much easier to learn and teach than building the conventional way. Apart from that, it is a new and very relevant skill in the South African context, for which there is a high demand locally. With the work STAG has in the pipeline now, we could create 12,500 sustainable, permanent jobs. We unfortunately do not have enough people with the right skills,” says Schooling.
“Our aim, therefore, is to offer training colleges to teach LSF building techniques to their students, while employing them. We will even draw up a curriculum. We can work up someone who is unskilled to highly skilled in two years. This is good for us, this is good for them, and for those whom rely on them financially: one laborer in South Africa on average supports seven to eight dependents.”
The pull of the classroom is still strong for Schooling, the teacher turned entrepreneur.

Three Birds,  One Stone

It’s curious, and almost incongruous, to see Juste Chisenga, the Grade 1B teacher at the Kasisi Primary School, give a lesson in a neat black suit and checkered tie in the Zambian language of Bemba.
It’s hot and sweaty under a rusted tin ceiling that has been around since 1924. The classroom walls are full of cracks and its light blue paint is peeling. Dozens of curling educational posters hang, yellowed with age.
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The children look as worn out as the building they are in. Some have walked as far as 14 kilometers to get here. Their uniforms are mismatched and layered in red dust.
This is the last place you would expect to see a teacher wearing a suit. Chisenga looks like a man from another time.
It’s also the last place you would expect to see children staring at a slideshow on a solar powered projector instead of a blackboard.
It’s even more bizarre seeing the same seven-year-olds sitting on uneven wooden desks and pulling out several smart tablets from a cardboard box to continue their lesson.
This is the brainchild of entrepreneur Mark Bennett. His idea is to help educate young Zambians by making a tablet part of their school curriculum for their villages.
“We decided to do something about the way teaching is done in Zambia&#8230; These days everyone has access to a cell phone. What’s more, in the rural areas they know how to work it; without being able to read. So we designed something that could be translated into several different languages&#8230; We’ve spent around $6 million developing the software with the help of 250 designers from around the world animating it. So far, we have had 2.3 million words translated into local languages and a quarter of a million sounds,” he says.
Bennett first came to Zambia in 1985 on a two-year contract to work at a computer center at the University of Zambia. He left the job twelve years later after the university figured out he was still on its payroll, he jokes. From there, he spent years bringing the internet to Zambia. He became a household name when he sold his Zambian internet service provider, AfriConnect, to Vodacom in 2005.
Wondering what to do next, Bennett’s idea for iSchool came seven years ago while sitting next to Clare Stead on a plane.
“We started by asking what would we do in education differently in the bush. What would you do to teach better,” says Stead, who is now the E-Learning project director for iSchool.
“The internet is a great learning tool but not for Africa. It’s not contextual. We found that children in rural areas didn’t understand why Elmo from Sesame Street would need to hang washing up between two skyscrapers in Seattle. Our first step was designing an education program suited for the rural people of Africa,” she says.
With overwhelming class numbers of between 60 to 100 children at a time, teachers in Africa are overworked, underpaid and lack organization, says Stead.
“With the ZEduPad, children can engage with the tablet and find answers faster than a teacher asking the same question 60 times over. We were also able to devise a curriculum plan for teachers to help them set goals for the week, for the month and for the whole year.”
It’s not always been smooth sailing. The team has encountered a number of hurdles including the Zambian government that passed a law to allow children to be taught in their mother tongue. It meant Bennett’s team had to write out whole new languages, including the first dictionaries for a number of dialects.
Regardless of the difficulties, Bennett remains resolute. Now in its second year, the project has distributed 7,000 tablets across Zambia.
The tablets are solar charged meaning they can go pretty much anywhere in the county, says Bennett. The children find them fun to use and, thanks to the language changes, easily understood. It makes learning easier than staring at a blackboard and far more interactive, says Stead.
The results according to teacher Chisenga have been amazing. His grin is as wide as the tablet he helps his grade ones complete their basic maths with. A man in a suit that looks as out of place in the classroom as the tablets.

Tablets  that ease the learning headache

Alegion of precocious iPad-toting mini Steve Jobses sit in a circle on the carpet at Little Ashford Preschool (LAP), in Johannesburg. This is South Africa’s first iPad preschool. It is the brainchild of educationalist and parent Jena Mukina. The woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo has a Master&#8217;s in business management from the University of Johannesburg. Her thesis tackled the impact of communication, technology and social media on children’s decision-making processes, so LAP is right up her street.
Thirty-year-old Mukina has led the introduction of cutting-edge technology into the classroom, with the establishment of LAP 2009 in Saxonwold, Johannesburg. Today, the city is home to three such learning institutions. She aims to transform the learning environment through innovation – not only within the pre-school environment but also in higher education.
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Mukina, also a full-time lecturer at her alma mater, was awarded a ‘best lecturer’ and ‘most innovative lecturer’ award in the faculty of management sciences. She struggled to find a preschool for her eldest daughter that met her expectations. At work at the time, her biggest challenge was to encourage her university students to think out of the box. She discovered that the issue was rooted in their foundational education and that the first eight years of a child’s life are the most vital for their future development. Fearing the same fate for her daughter, the hands-on mother began teaching her daughter and the neighbors’ children from home, before she lectured in the afternoon. Her class grew until she could no longer accommodate the children arriving each morning. It was then that Mukina traded the lectern for the ledger and became a business owner.
Being a mother of two has helped her learn to multitask and prioritize duties in her business, That means play time is play time, work time is work time and of course holiday time means no interviews for FORBES WOMAN AFRICA, she teases.
Educationalist Sir Ken Robinson dispels the myth that intelligence can only be measured through the one-dimensional lens of academia. Physical and emotional intelligence are equally important in the spectrum of human competency. Mukina’s preschool belongs to a new tradition that follows this philosophy. It was initially modeled on  Les Biboux, a progressive preschool in Brussels, Belgium. LAP has since come into its own by using Montessori best practice to nurture creativity, self-expression, individuality and confidence-building in children, in a playful environment. The curriculum encourages problem-solving and skills development. The preschool’s director, Marli Hoffman, stresses the importance of balance in the curriculum.
“The iPad is used in addition to, not in place of traditional learning. The children learn by doing,” she says.
The teachers also use the iPads to communicate with the youngsters’ parents, and even take photographs of the learners during the school day.
“All our communication happens via email, so parents have an idea of what their kids do on a daily basis,” says Hoffman.
Understandably, the question of costs is not far from the minds of prospective parents. The school subsidizes the cost of the iPad if it is bought from them. Parents agree that they get value for their money, especially when five-year-old Hlumisa begins teaching the other children at the park about the life cycle of the frog.
These upstart preschools are challenging their well-established competitors that act as gatekeepers into Johannesburg’s best primary schools. But realizing the dream of a world-class preschool has its downsides. As a small business with nearly 180 toddlers to run after and an annual turnover of around R9 million ($825,000), finance and HR have been bugbears.
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Mukina has ambitions to expand across South Africa, especially into Angola and Malawi, but the sensitive nature of early childcare means expansion is slow.
In her sights is a doctorate in education. It will help her influence policy changes to improve the state of education on the continent, where enrolment remains low and quality education is scarce. According to UNESCO, less than 12% of African children have access to early childhood care and education (ECCE), and 43 million school-aged children find themselves outside the formal education system in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“Early education is an essential, if we are going to have a better education system,” she says.
Slowly but surely, African governments have begun to step up efforts to ensure that more children enroll in pre-primary schools. For Mukina the question remains how to expand quality educational services so that they are not confined to pockets of Africa’s biggest cities.
If Mukina’s ambitions are anything to go by, we have reason to be optimistic about the future of Africa’s youth.

Tag: Classroom

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Building Africa’s Biggest Digital Classroom

Three Birds, One Stone

Tablets that ease the learning headache

Pencil, Eraser, iPad