by Isha Singhal
“Knowledge for all” is Bridge International Academies’ mission, simple and to the point. But you can’t truly begin to understand the planning and creativity that goes into running about 400 schools, let alone one, until you are a part of the process. Last semester, thanks to Northeastern’s co-op program, I had the incredible opportunity to understand this “behind-the-scenes” work as a Curriculum Writing Fellow at Bridge.
Bridge is the world’s largest chain of primary and pre-primary schools providing education to the poorest neighborhoods. Due to its well-crafted model, Bridge academies only cost $6 a month per pupil, allowing each academy to be sustainable after one year. In order to bring high-quality education to pupils in the slums, Bridge carries out continuous research on how to build academies, how to train teachers, and how to deliver and monitor lessons.
Although headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, the company’s curriculums are primarily created by the 30 or so fellows at its Cambridge location. When I first got there in January, Bridge had already made its mark all over Kenya. But in February I became a part of its expansion and watched as it opened its first seven academies in Uganda. After one month of revamping Kenya’s curriculum and two months of adapting that curriculum to fit Ugandan culture, I then helped lay down the framework and start that same process for Nigeria.
As a curriculum writer I had several tasks but my primary role was to create teacher scripts. Teacher scripts are lessons written in a very specific format so that our academy teachers know exactly what to say and do in their classrooms. I created my lessons by pulling the main ideas from each unit of our textbooks and forming activities appropriate for the given age group. As one of the first two Team Nigeria fellows, I used what I had learned from my time with the Kenyan and Ugandan teams to try and create a strong basis for future fellows to work off of. In order to see if my lessons were the right length and difficulty level, we sent them to our academies in Kenya to test them out. Later, I had the privilege of watching a week’s worth of videos of a 3rd grade social studies class using my scripts. Nothing was more gratifying than seeing how my work was helping some kids get one step closer to a more dignified future.
As I readjusted to the fall semester on campus, I received an email from my boss in which he shared the exciting news that Bridge had just celebrated the opening day at its very first Nigerian academy. He shared an album of overjoyed children wearing their green uniforms as they attended their first day of school. I was thrilled to hear that attendance exceeded our predictions and that the birthday of Bridge Nigeria had been a success.
Currently there are over 400 Bridge academies in 3 countries. With India next in line, Bridge continues to achieve its goal and hopes to educate 10,000,000 children in a dozen countries by 2025.
