One Year On
In March 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the globe, schools around the world began to close. In the weeks that followed, the Rising Academy Network team came together to create Rising On Air, a free distance learning solution to deliver high quality curriculum over radio. Originally designed for students in Sierra Leone and Liberia, it went on to reach over 12 million children in 25 countries, and was named as one of the top hundred education innovations ‘changing the face of global education in 2021’. This report, written by Natasha Japanwala, charts the story of how a lean, formidable group of educators collaborated on an emergency response with a lasting impact on the way they worked and what they collectively thought was possible.
1. The Lockdown
On 15th March 2020, when schools closed across Ghana and Liberia and were put on two weeks’ notice in Sierra Leone, Rising Academies’ co-founders Paul Skidmore and Stephanie Dobrowolski were halfway across the world in Pakistan. The meetings they had flown over for were cancelled in a flurry as news of the spreading Covid-19 pandemic paralyzed the world. As they scrambled to get back to West Africa, they had to navigate quarantines — and the challenge of keeping over 50,000 students safe and learning.
The order of priority was clear: keep staff and students safe; keep the lights on; keep learning going. Safety, finances, learning.
Because most of Rising’s HQ personnel had experienced Ebola in Sierra Leone and Liberia, they knew the drill. Hand washing and safety protocols were quickly instituted across their offices. All but a few essential staff were ordered to work from home (an adjustment that, like countless millions around the world, some took to very easily and others found more challenging).
In school communities, too, there was some amount of muscle memory from Ebola. But with the possibility that supply lines to more remote regions might soon be cut, there was an urgent need to increase these communities’ stocks of handwashing supplies. Beyond the buckets and soap Rising’s School Performance Manager team were delivering on the back of their motorbikes, they could also provide basic information, support and guidance to community leaders, many of whom were hearing about the virus for the first time in these meetings.
The risk, of course, was that awareness would not be the only thing they were spreading. “The critical challenge was to provide support and information to our communities, without our remote teams compromising their safety”, said George Cowell who was leading Rising’s operation in Liberia at the beginning of the crisis. “It was a real concern in those first weeks, that by trying to be helpful we would put our own communities at risk by spreading the virus. It was a risk we had to manage extremely carefully.”
Rising took advice from international public health organisations and health and education ministries. Health protocols were established and agreed upon that allowed Rising’s SPM team to visit communities with utmost care and safety.
In those early days of the pandemic, when the nature of the virus and the prognosis of the crisis was still uncertain, creating a sense of safety also involved thinking about psychological well-being, including for staff from overseas worrying about loved ones back home. “We didn’t want anyone to feel there was pressure to stay or go,” said Paul. Many people found themselves making an impossible call between choices that did not have obvious consequences yet. Paul found himself among them, as he debated whether he and his family should get on a repatriation flight organised by the U.K. government. “What I wanted to do professionally wasn’t necessarily the right answer for my family, but it wasn’t the wrong answer either. What was so extraordinary about Covid-19 was that it wasn’t obvious where in the world you were best off being. We decided to stay put… but it was extremely difficult. We just let the clock run out and heard the plane take off [without us].”
The next priority was to work out as quickly as possible where the company stood financially. A significant and immediate hit to its revenue was guaranteed by the imminent school closures. But it had three things in its favour. First, it entered the pandemic leaner and more cost-efficient than it had been previously. The previous two years had been a challenging period for the company, and it had needed to cut back its corporate overheads. These savings were coming good just when the company needed them. Second, while costs were down, revenue was up on the back of a 5x jump in student enrolment in the new academic year, a helpful tailwind with which to enter the pandemic. Third, revenue was not just higher, it was also more diversified: while tuition from its wholly-owned schools would dry up overnight once schools closed, revenue from its partnerships with government might prove more resilient if — and it was a big if — the company could demonstrate that it was continuing to play a valuable role in the emergency response to Covid-19.
The conclusion of the analysis was clear. The company’s finances were strong enough not to panic, and the best way to weather the storm was to be bold, to put forward a distance learning solution that was compelling and that could be relevant not just for the communities Rising served but also for its government partners.
2. Radio, but not as we know it
But what should that response be? With formidable obstacles to online learning in Sierra Leone and Liberia — more than 4 in 5 children in both countries, most of the 50,000 children in Rising’s schools among them, lacked internet access — that was the urgent question.
Three days after schools closed, the first organisation-wide virtual meeting was held to debate it. While a range of options were considered, radio was already emerging as an obvious answer — the infrastructure for it was already in place at a national level because of the Ebola crisis. Ownership of and access to radios was much higher than for other devices, especially in rural areas, and listenership to educational broadcasts during Ebola had apparently been as high as 50% to 70% at various points in the crisis.
But the quality of the traditional chalk-and-talk content that had been aired back then was decidedly variable. Whether it would be any better this time would depend on who was in the room when decisions were made, and what they had to offer. And unlike Ebola, when it had taken months to get lessons on the air, in both Sierra Leone and Liberia the Ministries of Education were looking to make those decisions quickly.
A historical focus on quality coupled with the scrappy entrepreneurialism and fierce hustle of team players both old and new would ultimately convince the Ministries of Education in both Sierra Leone and Liberia to involve Rising in their national response. But the team’s readiness to spring into action was a result of decisions that had been made long before.
3. The Catch-Up Program
Just before the pandemic struck, Rising’s Impact team was preparing to implement a catch-up reading and math program they had spent months researching and developing. Structured curriculum had always been at the heart of its academic model — “guides for every lesson, coaching for every teacher” — but this new effort followed an organisational commitment to invest in building foundational skills alongside grade-level national curriculum. “There is a learning crisis partially because we are teaching curriculum that students can’t access — if the curriculum isn’t a good match for where students are at, then we’re pushing a rock up a hill,” said Alexandra Fallon, Head of Innovation.
Influenced by the evidence-based Teaching at the Right Level approach pioneered by Pratham in India, Alexandra had set out to create a step-by-step approach for teaching literacy in the West African context. Alexandra’s team had been developing activities targeted at different aspects of foundational reading skills and practicing them with teachers in both Liberia and Sierra Leone. Through their feedback, they were able to iterate and adapt the activities to the local context.
Adapting the catch-up reading program to a format that worked for radio instruction involved establishing an overall parameter for the length of the program — 20 weeks was settled on as a reasonable starting point — then tweaking the framework to emphasize activities that involved listening, speaking, and writing. To allow for phonics practice through radio, the audio lessons would spell out words for children to write down and then support students to practice pronouncing those words.
“There is a renewed focus internationally on foundational reading, with an awareness that phonemic and phonetic skills are important,” said Alexandra. “What better way to do this than radio?” When students are learning to read, they look at letters and associate them with sounds, and then see if the combination of those sounds resembles a word they know. The same is true for learning to write: students have to be able to hear sounds, match them to letters they know, and then transcribe them.
The core structure was designed by the central curriculum team, while the in-country teams gathered feedback to customize the content for their context, improving the lessons iteratively as they went along. This became a template that the team could use to create lessons for other grade levels and subject areas. After the initial scripts for foundational literacy skills were drafted, the literacy team became an exemplar for the numeracy team, helping them adapt the same basic format to accommodate new content.
In the space of a few weeks the team had converted a promising catch-up program into a compelling set of initial radio scripts. But would anyone get the chance to listen to them?
4. Engaging the Ministry
All of this hard work would be for nothing unless the lessons made it onto the airwaves. Once a solid prototype of the radio lessons was ready, the next step was getting traction with partners. “It wasn’t about sharp elbows and being competitive for the sake of being competitive,” said Paul. “We were in a race for relevance during a period where everything was up for grabs — if we weren’t around the table before the dust settled, we might not have had a chance to be around the table again.”
In Sierra Leone, with Stephanie in mandatory quarantine and other senior staff members evacuated, this fell on the shoulders of Curriculum Associate, Elsiemae Melanie Buckle. On 26th March, she was invited to a meeting at the Teaching Services Commission (TSC). TSC had been tasked by the Ministry of Education with coordinating Sierra Leone’s emergency radio education program. Representatives from other schools and education providers who might be able to contribute to the program were present, notably the brilliant Educaid, a long-standing partner of Rising, alongside TSC and Ministry of Education staff. At the start of the meeting, no one knew who Melanie was. But she had come prepared.
Going to the front of the room, Melanie pretended the audience were students tuning into a broadcast. As she narrated a phonics activity where students had to clap out the syllables as they said the phrase “Apples are delicious!”, she got the room full of adults chanting and clapping along to “Apples! Are! Delicious!”.
“I tried to give them a sense of what it would be like on the air,” Melanie said. “In a classroom, you can see students and know they are engaged, but on the radio you have to be interactive to ensure they are listening to you.”
The consensus was unanimous. The next day, Melanie, was recording lessons that would quickly go on to air across the country.
Meanwhile, in Liberia, Rising staff worked with other organisations in the Liberian Education Advancement Program (LEAP) portfolio to coordinate an effective radio response with the Ministry of Education. First established in 2016 as Partnership Schools for Liberia, then adapted and relaunched as LEAP in 2018, LEAP had brought in a range of local and international partners to take over the management of a set of rural government elementary schools to see whether a change in management would improve learning outcomes. Over time, Rising had forged a close relationship with Youth Movement for Collective Action (UMOVEMENT), formalising this partnership in late 2019. When the pandemic hit, Urias Brooks, founder and CEO of UMOVEMENT, proved to be a critical ally.
On the morning of 27th March, James “JB” Bradley, who was Rising’s academic lead in Liberia at the time, heard from Urias that a meeting was going to take place later that same day at the Ministry. J.B. impulsively decided to join Urias to offer Rising’s support as the Ministry looked to respond to covid. Two hours later, Rising, as well as UMOVEMENT, were confirmed as an official partner for the Ministry’s distance learning program.
The speed of this decision was in part because of the trust that had been developed by Rising’s 4-year track record of working with the government, but it was also down to preparation done in the days and weeks before. JB was able to walk into the Ministry meeting with concrete examples of radio lessons ready to broadcast, and this made all the difference.
While Rising led on the content of the scripts, UMOVEMENT provided technical assistance in recording and editing the lessons, setting up a timetable for the lessons to air, and transporting them to radio stations across the country with which it had relationships from previous work. They were able to get the lessons, saved on flash drives, to stations in remote places that even the Ministry did not have set up.
The partnership did more than move Rising On Air along: the coordinated crisis response also demonstrated the value of the LEAP program in enhancing the Ministry’s capacity to deliver.
5. Recording and Airing the Lessons
Exactly two weeks after school closures were announced across West Africa, the first radio lesson was recorded in Sierra Leone. Three days later, the Ministry of Education in Liberia shared its first radio lesson on their Facebook page. With the distance learning programs in both countries well on their way, a period of furious activity kicked off across Rising.
“To be honest, I don’t even know how I transitioned. Everyone involved knew we just had to keep going,” said Melanie. Each day, the Teaching Services Commission in Sierra Leone would send her a vehicle, to take her from her house on the outskirts of Freetown to the Ministry office where a recording studio had been set up. The city under lockdown was quiet. “I had a mixed feeling I can’t explain and will never forget,” Melanie recalled. She had witnessed her country survive almost a decade without schooling during the war. To push through during Covid-19 meant a lot. “Nothing was going on, but learning was still going on and that was very important to me.”
In Liberia, a team of School Performance Managers from across the country temporarily relocated to Monrovia, where a room in the Rising office was converted into a makeshift recording studio. Leftover rolls of toilet paper, bought to distribute to communities as part of Covid-19 safety supplies, were put across the wall to improve sound quality.
Aaron Ballah, who had joined Rising in January as a School Performance Manager in Grand Bassa and Rivercess, slept in the Monrovia office from the end of March until June, and drank warm water all night to ensure his voice was always ready for recording.
Each day, the team recorded multiple lessons, played them back with sound engineers to make any necessary edits, and then sent the files off to radio stations across the country — either by updating the Ministry and uploading the files to a shared Google drive, or by saving the files on a flash drive and sending them out through Rising’s and UMOVEMENT’s networks to rural areas that the Ministry didn’t have the capacity to reach.
Aaron found that by narrating lessons across grade levels and subject areas, as well as professional development segments, he widened the scope of his own knowledge.
His colleague Krubo Solomon was also a new School Performance Manager turned radio presenter. She had been on the frontlines of the Ebola crisis, working in ambulances, taking away children whose parents had died from the disease. But even she was unprepared for the uncertainty wrought by Covid-19 and the pivot it demanded. “Radio was something I hadn’t done before. Taking on the task of being a presenter was a little bit challenging,” she said. “But as time went by, I got used to the microphone.”
As presenters, Aaron and Krubo had to imagine a physical classroom and bring it to life with their voices. “That was something that I was trying to get good at everyday,” said Aaron.
It wasn’t simply that the team had to adapt quickly to master a whole new skill set — they had to figure out how to do so in a new environment, with a new group of colleagues. “We gathered our School Performance Managers from different regions to work alongside some new hires,” said Peter Konmen, who like Aaron had moved from Grand Bassa to Monrovia for the duration of production. “I had to adapt to working with two groups of people: our own staff and the production staff we hired for Rising On Air.”
6. Going global
While the initial focus had been on supporting the national distance learning effort in Sierra Leone and Liberia, conversations with education leaders in other countries (and, crucially, with a small group of extremely nimble funders including Mulago, LGT Venture Philanthropy and UBS Optimus) in the early days of the pandemic quickly convinced the Rising team that there was an opportunity to think much more expansively and make a truly global contribution.
By early April, the outlines of the Rising ‘offer’ were becoming clear. A free, 20 week program of 30 minute radio lessons, for literacy and numeracy, for five broad age groups (early years, lower primary, upper primary, junior secondary and senior secondary), from which partners could take as much or as little content as they wanted. Released as “ready-to-air” scripts that required minimal adaptation, but under a Creative Commons license that would allow partners to make whatever changes they wanted. And all of this packaged under a single, common brand: Rising On Air.
On 3rd April, as the first radio lessons were airing across Liberia and Sierra Leone, Rising On Air was formally unveiled by Paul during a webinar organised by The Citizens’ Foundation as part of the Skoll Virtual World Forum. A web portal on the Rising website where partners could download scripts was launched at the same time.
The next problem was making sure there was enough content to go in the portal. This meant ramping up the curriculum development process fast enough to stay ahead of the broadcast schedules of partners. The initial framework designed by Alexandra and her team made it possible to pull components together rather than develop each lesson from scratch. Drafts of lessons were vetted by both the cross-cutting and in-country academic teams, creating a dynamic process that led to all the English medium content being completed by June.
Having everyone pitch into one mega project created an unprecedented energy. “The pace we were moving at went up five-fold,” said George. Initially the team was only thinking about their contribution in terms of their current Rising students; by the third week this had ballooned to reaching 10 million children with Rising On Air.
Setting ambitious targets was an intentional trick that generated excitement and persuaded a host of people to join the organisation to address critical capacity gaps that were opening up in every direction. Some were affiliated with Rising already, like Keya Lamba, a Zaentz fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who transitioned from creating an early childhood curriculum to scaling Rising On Air through securing global partnerships. Others were connected much more loosely, like Adam and Cassie Jimenez-Schulman, who had taken time out from studying and working in Europe to visit Rising’s schools in Liberia in January out of personal interest, and then found themselves playing critical roles in the development of Rising On Air less than two months later. While some of this team would ultimately return to their former lives as the pandemic receded, others have ended up staying with Rising.
“The go-getting temperament and character of the new people was exactly what we needed at that moment”, said Paul. “We were very lucky to have [them] around but it wasn’t totally accidental, in that we had been proactive about maintaining lines of communication and getting the right people on board for specific projects.”
7. Building a movement
A growing group of school networks and organisations operating in similar contexts expressed an interest in Rising On Air before, as, and after it launched. For the most part, this happened organically, through the team’s professional networks and their active participation in webinars and discussions organised by industry peers.
Impact Network, which runs community schools in rural Zambia was one of the first organisations to join Rising On Air, after George spoke at a webinar put together by the London-based Global Schools Forum. Reshma Patel, its Executive Director, was exploring radio options as soon as schools shut down. When she learned of Rising On Air, she shared some of the sample lessons with her early childhood and primary academics teams. It was easier for them to tweak and translate Rising’s lessons than create a whole new script from scratch. Within six weeks, they had built their own bank of four weeks’ worth of lessons and had kicked off ‘Impact Radio’. Like Rising, they focused on airing the lessons on two local radio stations to reach rural areas that the national response would not — they aired their lessons in May, while their Ministry’s radio lessons aired in mid-July.
One of Impact Network’s big bets was that if they reached students in numerous ways they would be much likelier to return to schools when they did reopen. “Radio is like the forgotten stepchild of ed tech,” said Reshma, explaining that it has a wider reach than television or online programming, even if it feels like a throwback or a return to an innovation from a previous era.
Miles away in Pune, India, The Akanksha Foundation, which runs 21 schools through a public-private partnership, was also experimenting with radio. Their student population was overwhelmingly made up of the children of daily wage workers who were suddenly without a source of income and did not own smartphones. They started off with a pilot for Grades 3 to 5 in Hindi at the end of June, before collaborating with Rising in mid-July. “The script was a treat to read,” said Shruti Manerker, an instructional specialist at The Akanksha Foundation, who particularly liked the holistic approach of the lessons, and the way they incorporated literacy, play, movement, and mindfulness.
They used different segments of the Rising lessons, modifying the activities to fit their context and adding it to their own programming. Once a week, they featured student voices, which they incorporated into the audio from voice notes they received from students who had been listening and responding. “Students love to hear themselves on air, it’s really exciting for them,” said Shruti. “It breaks the barriers between schools, and creates a virtual space where students across our network can hear each other.”
High in the mountains of neighbouring Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region, Innovate Educate Inspire (IEI) was bringing radio lessons to students in villages without access to the Internet. Marvi Soomro, IEI’s founder, came across Rising through a Google search, and after translating the lessons into Urdu, began broadcasting lessons during the first week of July. There are over 26,000 students between the ages of 5 and 16 in the region where the lessons aired — and even though the lessons cater to younger children, older students with achievement gaps in literacy also stood to benefit from them.
“I’m a 90s kid, the only radio I heard was in the car,” said Marvi. “This whole experience taught me to look at technology in a different way and understand that ed tech can mean very different things for people in different geographic contexts.” In Gilgit-Baltistan, radio devices are cheaper than the average smartphone, and one radio per family can serve multiple students. “It’s a great tool to help students practice their listening skills and a way to reach children who do not have access to classrooms.”
As new partners, like the World’s Largest Lesson Nigeria, Justice Rising (DRC) and Norwegian Refugee Council (Kenya), came on board, the web portal that had been knocked together in a few days by George and Operations Consultant Adam Jimenez-Schulman got a facelift from Web Developer Alex Caro. As well as making it easier to upload and download content, the team also wanted the portal to acknowledge the partnerships that were emerging in a community-oriented way that gave credit and recognition where it was due.
This was taken one step further through partnership with LEAD Africa, who took the Rising On Air script template to develop a student leadership series that was shared back through the portal, ultimately reaching students in Morocco, Liberia and Bangladesh.
Rising’s work with government partners also allowed other key priorities to be identified and acted on. In Liberia, teacher professional development was raised as an area of interest by Hon. Assistant Minister, Felecia Doe Sumah. J.B. and his team scoped a project that was ultimately delivered by Felicity Burgess and Sam Butterfield, who created a teacher professional development series of 50 scripts and audio recordings, also shared over the Rising On Air web portal.
8. Testing, testing
Back in Sierra Leone, with her team’s work on the government’s national radio distance learning program settling into an established routine, Stephanie was already asking what next.
“The assumption was that radio was the core. But we were interested in what additional strategies we could test quickly and that might be possible to scale well beyond our schools”, said Stephanie, who heads the company’s operations in Freetown and also serves as its Chief Impact Officer. “Especially because at that point [early in the pandemic], no one knew for sure how long this would be going on for, so if you could generate insights quickly it would be immensely useful not just for Rising but for our government partners and other stakeholders.”
From its earliest days, Rising had looked to partner with top tier third party researchers, working with the likes of Oxford University in Sierra Leone and the Center for Global Development (CGD) and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in Liberia. CGD was keen to work with Rising again, and together with Stephanie and her team they designed an experiment to look at whether two additional strategies would make any difference to whatever benefit the radio lessons were having: sending regular SMS (text) messages, and arranging regular one-on-one phone tutorials between teachers and students.
For the SMS program, the team would focus on supporting parents to support their children as engaged listeners and learners. After rapidly prototyping the SMS content with parents it seemed some were not aware of the radio lessons while others were interested in other suggestions for how to support their children. Based on this feedback, the team developed a series of SMS messages focused on increasing awareness of the radio programming (through reminders about the time different lessons were aired and on which radio frequency), providing helpful tips for improving participation in radio lessons (ranging from ensuring children had a quiet place to listen to encouraging an older sibling to join them for support), and providing positive tips to support parents during a stressful time (like advice on creating a consistent routine for children while they were out of school).
In the one-on-one tutorial phone call program, students would receive two calls per week (one each on reading and math). The calls would take place at pre-arranged times and run for approximately 15 minutes. During the call, students would review the previous weeks’ learning objectives from the radio lessons in a series of tasks and assessments. This would allow the teacher to identify gaps in students’ knowledge and provide bespoke support. Alexandra’s team created a recurring format and script for these calls, iterating as they went along by using feedback from students and teachers to improve the lessons.
The experiment was designed as a randomised controlled trial (RCT) funded under the World Bank’s Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund. A control group of students would be exposed just to the radio lessons (which the team went out of their way to make sure all students would have the best chance of being able to hear, including by arranging to air them on local radio stations in each community alongside the main national broadcasts). A first treatment group would get radio plus the SMS intervention. A second treatment group would get radio plus the SMS intervention plus the phone tutorials.
RCTs are sometimes described as the ‘gold standard’ of evaluation methods for the strength of the causal evidence they produce. But to generate this evidence can involve difficult program design choices at the best of times, never mind while trying to move quickly in the middle of a pandemic.
First, to get a big enough sample the target population would need to be the students in 25 government schools in Sierra Leone that Rising had only just begun working with barely three months before the pandemic hit. In the final two weeks of March, Rising staff had scrambled to collect as many phone numbers from these students as they could before schools closed, not even knowing at that stage exactly how that information would be useful. This throughline to students was what would ultimately make the RCT possible.
Second, the randomisation protocol meant that it wasn’t possible to assign teachers to their own students. Not only would teachers have to practise a brand new skill — engaging a student down a phone line — but they were having to build a relationship and rapport with a student they had never met before face to face.
Finally, while the SMS messages could be created and sent centrally, the whole point of the teacher phone calls was to be a distributed system. That required teachers to consistently make the calls, and students to consistently have access to the phones to receive them.
But while these challenges were daunting, the possibility of empowering parents to play a more active role in supporting their children’s learning (via the SMS) and empowering teachers with strategies that would prove useful in or outside the classroom felt worth a try. “This was the first time in my life that I called students on the phone,” said Abdul Mansaray, a teacher who was part of the experiment. “During the first week I found it difficult, but by the second and third weeks, I felt like I was learning something new. I picked up skills that I can now use in the classroom. I learned how to check for understanding.”
9. Collaborators On Air
By May, with interest in low-resource distance learning in general and Rising On Air in particular growing, the Rising team partnered with EdTech Hub to launch Collaborators On Air. Collaborators On Air was a Slack Workspace where members could share content related to their use and adaptation of the radio lessons, particularly around implementation strategies and impact measurement, as well as distance learning strategies more widely. The community grew to over 100 members, from countries including Botswana, Uganda, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Pakistan, India, and Cambodia, among many others. The community hosted three webinars around topics they wanted to delve into further: the importance of collaboration and partnership in challenging moments, caregiver engagement and behavior change, and non-internet based tech solutions to learning.
The conversations that Collaborators On Air enabled emphasised that making content open-source is just the first step. Given the variability in contexts, a community where members could troubleshoot with experts and practitioners alike provided an iterative approach to development, where evidence of what does and does not work could be shared and unpacked in real time.
Collaborators On Air surfaced stories of how the radio lessons originally developed for use in Liberia and Sierra Leone quickly traveled across the world — and the innovations they inspired as they were adapted for use in different languages and countries.
Collaborators On Air was particularly valuable to Marvi of Pakistan’s IEI who, being a software engineer by profession, did not have a huge network of other educators to consult. When she was thinking of launching an SMS-based program to support teachers, Marvi was able to learn about the one Rising was running in Liberia.
IEI has since partnered with other education organisations in Pakistan by sharing 12 weeks worth of literacy lessons in MP3 format. The lessons are of a high enough quality that they are played in classrooms as an aide to support literacy development, and IEI has built an assessment to go with the lessons.
Rising subsequently partnered with EdTech Hub, and in particular, Chris McBurnie from their team, to capture and codify some of the practical lessons that emerged from its own experience and the experience of other Collaborators On Air partners in a how-to guide. “Since the outbreak of the pandemic, many of our partners have been looking for advice on how to get started with designing and implementing an impactful radio education programme,” says EdTech Hub’s Chris McBurnie. “Rising’s how-to guide walks through the life cycle of delivering engaging radio content from planning broadcasts to evaluating and iterating materials, from high-level principles to practical tips on how to make do without a professional studio. This approach has helped us support partners with different levels of preparedness and experience to respond to and recover from the current crisis.”
One Platform, Many Languages
From the outset, Rising On Air scripts were designed to be readily adaptable by partners to meet local needs and circumstances — including translations into appropriate local languages. At least 9 partners made these adaptations (into Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Leblango, Chinyanja, Hausa, Krio, Kiswahili, and Tagalog).
But as interest in the platform and the number of partners grew, it made sense to make this adaptation process even easier by making the core content available in more languages and new formats.
With the support of funding from UBS Optimus Foundation, the core scripts were translated into Arabic and French, and made available on web portals in those languages to deliver a tailored user experience to Arabic and French-speaking partners.
The Francophone effort was led by Sarah Pariser. A French national who had spent several years working in operations with another school network in Africa, she had joined Rising’s team in Sierra Leone in January 2020 to work on a short-term project before returning to France for postgraduate study. Like so many others, she found her job responsibilities turned upside down, and was instead tasked with building a Francophone curriculum team from scratch, building a French language version of the web portal, and then leading the outreach to potential Francophone partners, leveraging her networks from previous roles. This would ultimately include governments in Guinea and Chad, and NGOs, schools and companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso and Benin.
As well as innovations in language, partners also innovated in format. The High School Schorge of Koudougou in Burkina Faso, for example, did not have the means to record and broadcast the scripts but used them to send prompts and exercises via WhatsApp to students instead.
In mid-July, Somaia Razzak joined Rising to lead the team of 11 translators, based all over the world from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon, responsible for developing the Arabic content. Even more than with French, the task went beyond translation because of the differences between Arabic and Roman script. “We are not just translating the lessons,” said Somaia. “The way phonics and grammar are taught in English and Arabic are different, as is the format in which numbers are read — the translators need to pay attention to the scripts to make sure the instructions are rephrased. For example, when the scripts instruct students to draw out numbers, the directions have to be rewritten so that students understand numbers as they are read: the number 25 is commonly read as ‘five and twenty’ in Arabic”.
The trickiness of translation was not limited to the scripts. Alex had to troubleshoot in order to get the Arabic script onto the Rising website, as most web development platforms are built for English-language users. “When you paste Arabic code into html, it switches the Latin script and moves it around in a way that doesn’t make it run properly,” said Alex.
To make the lessons audibly accessible to anyone around the world, Alex suggested uploading the content to a podcast platform. This would mean that English-speaking partners could easily share the lessons without recording them again. It would also make it easier for students to catch up with lessons if they missed a radio broadcast. This was especially true for students with learning disabilities, as podcasts can be played back multiple times and at variable speeds.
Podcasts also made it possible to download the lessons and play them offline without an Internet connection. Since the format was conceived with the Techno phones owned by most Liberians in mind, they were designed to be accessible to students and families with limited data who lived in rural areas where network signals were unreliable. By installing the open source AntennaPod app from the Google Play Store, listeners could download the lessons on phones with low memory as well.
“Podcasts aren’t traditionally used this way,” said Alex. “They occur in weekly or monthly episodes, while we were aiming to put 200 lessons online at once to create a store of knowledge.” The fact that open-source apps already existed for podcasts meant that it was easy to create content and share it without making huge infrastructure investments. “It’s an evergreen solution, and an ideal format for reaching students across the digital divide — if you get the best content in a podcast format, you can deliver that instantly.”
On 8th August, a week after all existing audio lessons were uploaded onto the podcasting app, Rising received approval from Apple for it to be listed on iTunes.
10. Phone calls and SMS
At the end of August, with the announcement that schools in Sierra Leone would re-open fully in October, the Rising team wrapped up its phone tutorial and SMS experiment. It had run for 4 months, from May to the end of August. In that time, they sent over 260,000 SMS messages encouraging engagement in the radio lessons, and each of the students in the tutorial intervention had received an average of 16 calls.
With results from the RCT pushed back by some unforeseen delays in data collection, in November Data and Analytics Manager Francisco Carballo Santiago and his team of enumerators led their own rapid assessment exercise, surveying 2,400 students in the space of 2 weeks to help Rising gauge the impact of the interventions while they awaited findings from the evaluators. Francisco crunched the numbers — and was surprised by what he saw.
Most surprising were the underlying trends in learning across the different groups. Amid all the talk globally of the huge learning losses predicted during the pandemic, students in the control group (who only received radio) and both the treatment groups (radio plus SMS, and radio plus SMS and phone tutorials) had actually made learning gains between March and November. That was good and unexpected news.
When it comes to the additional ‘treatment’ effects of the SMS and phone tutorials, Francisco is careful not to prejudge the conclusions of the external evaluators but says that based on his preliminary data he is not optimistic.
Whatever the eventual conclusion, for Stephanie, it speaks to something really important about Rising that it was willing to give it a try. “You’d alway prefer to find positive results”, she says. “But from our point of view, we are very proud that in the middle of a pandemic — a time, if ever there was one, that called for ‘ands’ not for ‘ors’ — we didn’t settle for just helping the government get high quality radio lessons onto the air within three weeks of schools closing, but also partnered with world-class researchers to rigorously test some additional ways to help kids get more from those lessons. As we like to say at Rising, ‘however well we do, we always strive to do better’, and we can only live up to that if we’re rigorous and transparent about research and evidence.”
11. Beyond Covid-19
Rising On Air was designed as a response to a crisis. But as the Covid-19 pandemic drew on, it became increasingly clear that the potential for Rising On Air could be leveraged to serve students who had historically been kept out of school due to other crises.
The impetus behind building the Arabic portal, then, was not just to make the radio lessons available to Arabic speakers in Africa, but to expand them to an audience in the Middle East as well. “Once we record the lessons, anyone can use them from Morocco to Iraq,” said Somaia, explaining that the official language in schools is modern standard Arabic and is the same everywhere.
“Informal learning is really important for internally-displaced and refugee communities, where students miss several years of school education,” said Somaia, who grew up in Syria. Radio lessons, while a temporary solution, allow for incremental progress for out-of-school children who have been displaced from their communities. “It gives them the motivation to learn on their own, and a reason to remain hopeful.”
Somaia shared a story about when she visited a school in Lebanon. “There are so many areas where there are not enough seats in schools and refugee children have to register on waiting lists and wait at home until they are accepted,” she said. “In these cases, they can start listening to radio lessons and continue learning. It’s a valuable asset for situations where there is uncertainty.” Today, as a result of relationships and capabilities built during the pandemic, a Lebanese partner is using Arabic versions of Rising’s core curriculum in its work with Syrian refugees. At least 3 of the other Rising On Air partners focused on using it with communities of refugees or internally displaced persons.
Realizing that Rising could produce materials and tools with enduring value to the world after Covid-19, and with relevance not just beyond the countries where Rising operates schools but beyond the very setting of school itself, opens all kinds of new possibilities.
One goes by the name Rori.
Almost a year to the day after the pandemic began, the company announced that it had won R&D funding as part of the Schmidt Futures/Citadel Tools Competition to create Rising On Air Interactive, or Rori, a chatbot tutor, powered by AI and delivered via SMS and WhatsApp.
Unlike conventional chatbots, Rori will be able to pull text and audio clips from our Rising On Air library, personalised to the learning needs of each individual student. “We like to think of it as being like a Spotify playlist for learning”, says George, who is leading the initiative in partnership with a development team at Filament AI.
12. The Stories That Define You
In 150 days, Rising developed a free, downloadable, multi-language distance learning program for radio and scaled it to 25 countries and 12 million children through partnerships with over 35 organisations. It helped government partners in Sierra Leone and Liberia get quality content on the air within 3 weeks of school closing when better resourced governments in the same region took more than 3 months. And it created relationships and solutions that may endure well beyond the duration of this crisis.
The success in the Tools Competition followed recognition for Rising On Air from Finland’s HundrED which named it one of their top 100 global innovations ‘changing the face of education in 2021’, and from the mEducation Alliance, where it received their 2021 literacy award. It has also been featured in publications by the World Bank, OECD, EdTech Hub, and Education Above All. And as well as the organisational plaudits, outstanding individual contributions have also been recognised, with Melanie honoured by former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s Presidential Center as a “COVID-19 Heroine”.
But maybe the most important legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic for Rising will be the way it brought the organisation together.
That started at the top. The company entered 2020 with a lean top team of just three people: founder and CEO Paul, co-founder Stephanie and George — recently elevated from running operations in Liberia to a cross-cutting role as People and Programmes Director. “Having a tight-knit top team served us enormously well, especially in the first weeks after the crisis when we needed to move fast and take decisions quickly,” said Paul.
Forging a response to Covid-19 bridged the geographic divide between the different country teams and brought different levels of the hierarchy of the company closer. A key mechanism was a simple weekly virtual meeting, chaired by George who had immediately been put in charge of coordinating Rising’s Covid-19 response once the pandemic began. This started with a dozen people and quickly almost tripled in size. “Those meetings, which we didn’t have before, were crucial during those first months when we were bringing our effort together and [building] a shared sense of direction,” said George. “The crisis helped strip away some of the impediments to working collaboratively. The differences between the two country’s teams faded away, because we were doing the same thing [everywhere],” added Paul.
For a company historically organised around geographic location, and that had found it hard to break down those silos, particularly striking was how well the cross-cutting teams that looked after curriculum, data and evaluation started to integrate with the in-country operational teams. “The only way you can scale an organisation like Rising is by having an effective cross-cutting team,” continued George. “You need shared central expertise to make sure you can scale across countries.” This spirit was critical to bottle up and preserve. “It’s given us a template to use moving forward,” added Paul.
From the outside, it’s possible to think that Rising responded to the pandemic the way it did because it had some kind of playbook from the Ebola Epidemic. That would be far from the truth. The Rising that faced Ebola in 2014 was not the Rising that faced Covid-19 in 2020. What would be more accurate is to say that Rising’s culture was forged by the experience of having to navigate a massive, unforeseen crisis in the very earliest moments of its life. In the 6 years that had gone by since, much had changed and that culture was in danger of fraying at the edges. From the things that went well, to the things that didn’t, Covid-19 galvanised Rising to rediscover the best of its culture, and renew it.
“I was asked a few times early on what advice I’d give based on our experience [from Ebola]”, said Paul. “The situation for each organisation is going to be different but my main message was that what you do in a crisis, the stories that define you, echo down the years. They become the reference point for staff. They become what you’re remembered for.”
Natasha Japanwala is a writer and educator from Karachi. She cares about continuously improving school systems to achieve the best outcomes for all learners, and about making stories and storytelling more accessible in all their multitudes. She is currently applying improvement science to accelerate on-time graduation rates for students in Baltimore City Public Schools. Her reporting on youth, politics, and art in Pakistan has appeared in publications around the world, including Al Jazeera and The Washington Post. She holds an Ed.M. in international education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in English literature from Princeton University. She can be reached via Twitter or LinkedIn.
Gallery
