Bridge International Academies

Bridge International Academies

Company type	Social enterprise
Genre	Education innovation organisations
Founded	2008
Headquarters	Nairobi, Kenya
Area served	Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, India, Liberia
Website	bridgeinternationalacademies.com

Bridge International Academies is a leading education innovation organisation founded in Kenya in 2008, working with governments and parents across Africa and Asia to create access for all children to a high-quality education needed to progress and thrive. Bridge operates over 470 nursery and primary schools in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, India and Liberia. Bridge uses technology to streamline school administration, deliver lesson plans to teachers, facilitate classroom management, and track learning gains in real time. Moving towards global education reform one child at a time, Bridge is dedicated to proving that children everywhere can have access to high-quality educations and the opportunity to live up to their potential.

History

Bridge International Academies was founded by friends Shannon May, Jay Kimmelman and Phil Frei, who met at Harvard University to solve for some of the most intractable problems in education and development, including: underprepared teachers, rampant teacher absenteeism, ill-equipped classrooms, and fraudulent administrative practices. The challenge was to find a way to offer a high-quality education free from these problems at a cost lower than most other private academies. The key was devising a business model based on scalability, and designing an innovative, technology-driven teaching method and system of administrative management.

Bridge’s headquarters opened in Nairobi, Kenya in 2008. The first academy launched in 2009 in Makuru kwa Njenga, an east-Nairobi slum that is home to over 100,000 people. From 2009 to 2015, Bridge expanded across Kenya, bringing its innovative approach to education to thousands more children every year. In 2015, the company became international, opening schools in Uganda and Nigeria. In 2016, Bridge opened in Andhra Pradesh, India, in a partnership with the Government of Andhra Pradesh to use disused school buildings to create Bridge schools. Additionally, Bridge partnered with the Government of Liberia to employ its proven teaching and management methods in free public primary and nursery schools.

Today, co-founders Shannon May and Jay Kimmelman are married and run Bridge together from the headquarters in Nairobi, where they live year-round with their children. In addition to the Nairobi headquarters, Bridge also has offices in Kampala, Lagos, Monrovia, Vijayawada, London, Boston, and Washington, DC.

Educational model

Philosophy

Bridge believes high-quality education is every child’s birthright. When children are denied access to education, they are robbed of the chance to reach their innate potential. Bridge aims to help children everywhere reach their potential by making high-quality education accessible. The organisation's mission is global education reform which starts with one child and ends with children everywhere.

Approach

Bridge's approach uses a central team of education experts to prepare content and monitor student progress, allowing teachers to focus solely on student engagement. Bridge equips its teachers with a tablet onto which they download daily lesson plans and teacher guides. A team of pedagogical experts spends 10–15 hours designing each lesson, ensuring content is aligned with the national curriculum of the country of operation. The teachers guides set out the content and structure for each lesson, allowing our teachers to expend less energy on class preparation and more energy on engaging with each student. Teachers are trained to lead their classes in a way that encourages and allows students to actively participate, to ask questions and think critically about the material the teacher presents. A typical lesson consists of three parts: first, a teacher demonstrates a concept or solves an equation; next, the teacher guides students through the solving of a similar problem; for the majority of the lessons, students then work independently, applying and practicing what they’ve learned. The teacher circulates around the classroom checking for understanding, assigning new questions for excelling children, and giving individual attention to struggling children. Bridge stresses the importance of creating a well-rounded education experience, so in addition to classroom lessons, the Bridge curriculum also includes extra-curricular activities such as sports, art, music, and debate. Lastly, Bridge schools are different from many competitor schools in that they prohibit their teachers from using corporal punishment.

Structure

Bridge is managed through a centralised system, lowering the administrative costs for operating individual schools. Each Bridge school has only one administrative staff member, known as an academy manager, who manages the school through a smartphone loaded with a custom-developed application that connects managers to a central cloud-based server. The app tracks student admissions and billing in real-time and serves as a financial management tool for the overall academy, including fee payments, expense management, and payroll. By using a central team to manage the operations of all its schools, academy managers are able to focus on teacher support and parent engagement instead of administration.

Monitoring and evaluation

As a data driven organisation, Bridge uses technology and roving quality assurance teams to track learning outcomes. The teacher tablets monitor attendance, timing of lesson delivery, and pupil comprehension, which is uploaded daily onto the central server. The central academic team can then review outcomes to iterate lessons in real time, or identify needs for further teacher training. The academic team additionally identifies new methods or resources they believe can aid learning and gathers data on results. Bridge uses this unprecedented data on learning to not only improve its model, but also to contribute to wider pedagogy.

Results

According to a report released in 2015, Bridge International Academies pupils consistently outperform their peers at neighbouring schools. The so-called ‘Bridge effect’ was found to equate to .31 standard deviations in English and .09 standard deviations in maths. This is equivalent to over 32% and 13% more schooling in one academic year for English and Maths, respectively.

In 2015 the first graduating class sat the national primary exit exam in Kenya. The results showed that pupils had a 40% higher chance of passing the exam than the national average.

Bridge schools

Bridge in Kenya

The first Bridge International Academy opened in the Mukuru slum in Nairobi in 2009. After a successful pilot, 1341 pupils were enrolled at Bridge academies by the end of 2010. 2011 saw the first substantial expansions outside Nairobi and by the end of 2015 Bridge was teaching over 100 000 pupils across the country.

Bridge in Uganda

Bridge launched in Uganda in 2014, and now has 63 schools across the country. In 2016, the Ugandan Ministry of Education issued an interim order calling for closure of all Bridge schools, citing poor sanitation, improper school registration, and the lack of trained teachers, a requirement for schools under national law. BIA has appealed to the Ugandan High Court for a stay of the closure and were maintaining operations as of September 2016.

Bridge in Nigeria

Bridge opened its first two academies in Lagos state, Nigeria in September 2015. It has since opened four more academies in the state.

Bridge in India

In July 2016, Bridge opened four schools in Andhra Pradesh, India.

Bridge in Liberia

As part of the Partnership Schools for Liberia program, Bridge International Academies will operate schools across the country from September 2016. At the end of the one-year pilot program, independent administrators will decide whether the program should be expanded.

George Werner, the Minister for Education for Liberia, said of the opportunity; “If we went by the status quo to continue doing what we have been doing, it will take decades for Liberia to catch up”

Media coverage

Bridge’s unique education innovation model has attracted a large amount of media coverage. In the United States, there have been articles about Bridge in a number of major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Huffington Post. In the United Kingdom, the organization was featured in The Independent and The Economist amongst others. A number of ed-specific outlets such as EdTech Review and EdSurge, have also written about Bridge, which has also been covered extensively in news in countries of operation.

The organisation has also received some criticism in the media during its expansion and a number of education groups and trade unions have been vocal critics. In particular, its status as a for-profit education provider has been a point of controversy – although it has also been pointed out that being a for-profit social enterprise has facilitated investment in research and development, allowed the Bridge education model to be scaled and ensured accountability to parents.

Funding and investors

Bridge has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including Bill Gates, CDC, DFID, IFC, kholsa ventures, LearnCapital, NEA, Novastra Ventures, Omidyar Network, OPIC, Pan African Investment Co., rethinkedcuation, Zuckerberg Education Ventures, Pershing Square Foundation and LGT Impact Ventures.

Awards and acclaim

Bridge has received a number of awards for its work. In 2015, it was awarded the WISE (World Innovation Summit in Education) Award, the Economist Innovation Awards and the OPIC Development Impact Award, as well as being named in the World’s Top 10 most innovative companies.

Co-founders Jay Kimmelman and Shannon May have also received a number of awards for their work, sharing the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneurs of the Year Award 2014, as well as both being named on the CNBC Next List 2014.