This is the innovative educational project capable of transforming the future of thousands of children

There are many vulnerable environments in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia where education is still a pending issue.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
21 October 2022 Friday 21:31
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This is the innovative educational project capable of transforming the future of thousands of children

There are many vulnerable environments in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia where education is still a pending issue. Very specifically, the primary school dropout rate in Ghana is 7%, a percentage that rises to 20% in the rural regions of the north, according to data from UNICEF and the World Bank.

And it is that, despite the progress made to improve access to education for the entire population, the sub-Saharan country still faces great barriers that prevent thousands of boys and girls from going to school. Added to this problem are other challenges related to the learning environment, such as classes saturated with students, the shortage of trained teachers, the state of the facilities or the lack of school supplies.

Transforming education, improving the possibilities and resources for the children of Ghana to receive what constitutes a human right for all of them is more necessary than ever. Only in this way will the educational gap in the world be reduced, acting in this environment and in as many as necessary.

ProFuturo, the digital education program of Fundación Telefónica and Fundación ”la Caixa”, is already working on this goal. On this occasion, it does so together with the NGO NASCO Feeding Minds, with whom it has signed a collaboration agreement whose objective is to improve the educational quality of thousands of Ghanaian children through an innovative digital education project that seeks to create opportunities for future for the local community.

"This collaboration responds to a strategic line that seeks to generate synergies and opportunities to grow sustainably in Africa and Asia, managing to take digital education further and further and to more people," explains Magdalena Brier, general director of ProFuturo.

In this strategic alliance, ProFuturo will contribute its platform, its content and all its experience in educational innovation to the infrastructure and technological equipment of the educational centers where NASCO Feeding Minds is present, to which ProFuturo will adapt its Comprehensive Digital Education Model.

In the next 12 months, the project that seeks to reduce inequalities in Africa will benefit around 3,000 school-age children (mainly primary school, but also secondary), although the initiative has the potential to benefit more than 7,000 students a medium term. This will be implemented in 43 rural educational centers, mostly public, in nine regions near the Mole National Park: Sawla, Tuna, Kalba, Kulmasa, Jintalpe, Nahare, Techiman, Gindabuo and Fiaso.

The collaboration started in September, after a first phase in which the 14 ICT classrooms that will form part of the project have been set up and in which comprehensive training will be given in a hybrid format to the 23 educators who will assume the role of coaches . These, in turn, will train and accompany other teachers and directors of educational centers to ensure the acquisition of digital and transversal skills (management and leadership).

Other functions will be to benefit children by incorporating content and digital tools to promote communication skills, cooperation and teamwork, and improve the learning experience in the classroom.

“With this project we act from the root. We believe that digital education is a seed capable of generating a more prosperous future for thousands of young Ghanaians. With the help of ProFuturo, our computer labs will multiply their impact in offering personalized and transformative learning,” says Ousman Umar, founder of NASCO Feeding Minds. The entrepreneur, a native of Ghana, created the NGO in 2012 with the mission of "feeding minds" and the conviction that education is the most effective way to provide solutions to the problem of immigration in the country of origin.

With this new step and hand in hand with NASCO Feeding Minds, ProFuturo will not only begin to implement its education program in Ghana, but also inaugurate a new way of collaborating on the ground that provides greater sustainability to the project.