Nigerian Obinna Ukwuani went to the USA to finish his secondary education and gor involved in competing in a robotics league. Two things grew out of it: firstly,
he ended up teaching High School students robotics and secondly, he believes it helped him in his successful application to teach at MIT.
Having taught students robotics for two years, the programme was cancelled in the third year. When he told his father about this in a phone call, he rather off-handedly suggested, why don't you do it in Nigeria? Ukwuani spent a year scoping the idea and quickly discovered that there were no programmes like it in Nigeria:"I was confident before I started that parents would pay for kids to go... There was nothing like this for the kids."
"At MIT, I called together classmates who said they were interested in starting it and we approached companies in Nigeria, looking for funding. We soon locked in enough funding for the first year."
In 2012, he ran the programme for the first time with 30 kids, the year after there were 45 kids and the year after that 35 kids. The curriculum was 70% robotics and 30% preparation for college.
There's no vocational niche for anybody who knows robotics in Nigeria yet but that's not really the point. Like Seymour Papert's work with Logo, getting students to programme a robot is about something else. The curriculum has three elements: applied maths and science, computer programming and engineering design.
"We use robotics as a platform for creative problem solving and programming." In addition, its students begin to understand engineering principles, leadership and teamwork collaboration. From my own experience of listening to managers in Africa talk about the skills that are currently lacking, these are all on the list.
"In 3 days, kids who'd never seen a computer were writing code and it's a five week programme. So they can plan and write programmes to navigate robots." For all of these reasons, it attracts both parents and kids who are "dissatisfied with the education status quo and are seeking more opportunities". The learning by rote aspects of education in Africa are one of its greatest weaknesses in a world that requires flexible and creative thinking."
As an education entrepreneur, his ambition has not stopped at running a summer school. He wants to build the first STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) secondary school in Nigeria, if not the whole of West Africa.
The curriculum would be built around making and inventing things, using 3D printers and laser cutters. Its graduates would be the sort of people who would go to MIT in the USA and Imperial College in the USA:"I want to create the next generation of African problem-solvers."
The school would be a self-sustaining institution that pays for itself out of fees: "It would be an elite school by its very nature, charging fees of US$23,000 to 28,000 a year. It would need 600 students to be self-sustaining."
It needs US$17 million to develop the curriculum and build the school. Ukwuani has worked out that it would take 2-3 academic years to break even. He is looking for 30% equity and 70% loan funding plus US$0.5 million in seed funding to allow time and effort to develop the project.
Although it sounds madly ambitious, you only have to look at Nigeria's neighbor Ghana where another education entrepreneur Patrick Awuah started the privately run and funded Ashesi University: it also shares an emphasis on problem solving. West Africa desperately needs high-quality science and engineering minds. The current generation of Africa start-ups mostly lack any deep grounding in engineering and code, the very things this school will be designed to instill.
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