James Alexandroff, program director of the Perovli Schools Trust discusses the charity's work and how the idea of "blue peter on steroids" is working, and working well.

A daunting challenge

Africa is forecast to account for over 40% of the global population by the end of the decade from its current level of 17%. Population numbers across many Sub-Saharan countries are doubling every eight years. This all means there’s a huge number of young children of nursery school age, but limited state-funded resources for nursery schools.

We wanted to find a solution that was highly scalable and affordable so we opted for a training model rather a bricks and mortar one. Our Perivoli Trainers show groups of up to thirty teachers at a time how to organise their classrooms and how to make activities for the children out of recyclable materials. They also visit each of them monthly in their classrooms.

There are about one million nursery schoolteachers in the ten countries we seek to address in Sub-Saharan Africa. So far we have reached 18,500 in five countries and are growing rapidly.

Our goal is to see dropout rates and repeated years at primary school decline from high levels, knowing that when a child is denied education or held back a year at such a young age, they tend to lose their self-confidence.

Equally we hope to see a decline in early pregnancies – a big issue in the region. Research shows a girl who reads ends up with two children but one who doesn’t ends up with five on average, which makes for a challenging life.

‘Blue Peter on steroids’

I often say the simplest way to describe our programme is like ‘Blue Peter on steroids’. We show the teachers how to make educational activities out of recyclable materials and encourage them to be creative. We also show them how to organise their classrooms to be more child friendly.

Just by using bottle tops, egg trays, or even old clothes, it’s possible to come up with a counting or matching game, toy shop, dressing-up box, pretend kitchen or even a music corner. In fact, we aim for teachers to establish twelve so-called ‘corners’ in each of the classrooms, all activity centres of different types.

The materials, of course, cost nothing, and the teachers take great pride in equipping their classrooms, becoming super creative.

Digitalisation

Interacting with so many teachers is clearly a challenge. Our solution has been to homogenise the programme through digitisation. We issue the Perivoli Trainers with tablet computers with which they are required to record details of every interaction, the names of the teachers and the children and the rate at which each of the twelve corners are introduced into the classrooms.

The data is stored in a database, designed by a software house in Malawi. This allows us to track progress and introduce a trainer bonus system whereby they are awarded with a six-monthly bonus on reaching their targets.

Funding and governance

The programme is funded by the Perivoli Foundation, a UK Charity, which is itself funded by the Perivoli Trust, a family trust with a philanthropic focus.

We hope that in due course, the Foundation will be funded directly by Perivoli Innovations which is the venture capital arm of the Perivoli Trust. It has supported sixty or so early stage businesses with positive societal aims, twenty of which are in Africa.

We take governance very seriously. We establish local NGOs in each of the countries where we operate and engage with local Ministries. In fact, we like to invite local ministry people to hand out the Perivoli Certificates at our graduation ceremonies for the nursery school teachers.

We request written consent from the teachers and the parents before we record their personal details in our database. Whilst this is not required by local laws, we hold ourselves to UK-level GDPR standards and have already collected over 150,000 consent forms.

Our impact is being assessed by an Impact Study being undertaken by the University of Bristol in conjunction with the University of Namibia. They are assessing the lived experiences of some of the people we interact with in Namibia – the trainers, the teachers, the children and local officials and leaders. It’s a three-year study that will report in 2024. We wait with bated breath to hear what they have found, but we’re hopeful it will show the positive impact we have made.

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