Bridge International Academies

Bridge International Academies ('Bridge') is a for-profit private network of schools [4] [5] and (self-defined as) a "social enterprise" [6][7][8][9] which began in Kenya in 2007. [10] Bridge aims to ensure more children have increased access to a quality education. To achieve this they support government schools and also run community schools.[11][12]

Bridge International Academies
For-profit education [1] [2]
GenreLow cost private schools
Founded2008[3]
FounderDr Shannon May, Jay Kimmelman, Phil Frei
HeadquartersNairobi,
Kenya
Area served
India, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda
Websitehttp://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/

Bridge believes in ongoing teacher training and support, advanced lesson plans and the use of wireless technology to deliver education. They have been a participant in the United Nations Global Compact[13] since September 2017.

Bridge runs or supports nearly 2,000 (mainly public/government) schools and has educated a million children in the last decade. It's aiming to educate 10,000,000 pupils by 2025. It currently operates schools in India,[14] Kenya,[15] Liberia,[16] Nigeria[17] and Uganda.[18] It is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya with additional offices in Kampala, Lagos, Monrovia, Vijayawada, London, Boston, and Washington, DC.

Through the use of technology it streamlines school administration, delivers lessons plan to teachers, facilitates classroom management and tracks the progress of both teachers and students in real time.[19] It has notable investor support from Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.[20]

History

Bridge International Academies was founded by friends Shannon May, Jay Kimmelman and Phil Frei, who met at a 5 year reunion 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. [21]

In 2007, Bridge’s headquarters opened in Nairobi, Kenya in 2008. The first academy launched in 2009 in Mukuru 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, Bridge continued growth in Kenya and expanded internationally, into Uganda and Nigeria.

Bridge opened a London, UK office and was awarded one of six World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) Awards for innovation in education.[22]

In 2016, Bridge opened six schools in Andhra Pradesh, India in a partnership with the Government of Andhra Pradesh to use disused school buildings to create Bridge schools.[23]

Bridge was also chosen as one of the first partners by the Liberian Ministry for Education’s Partnership School for Liberia[24] (PSL) program. The programme is a public-private partnership.[24]. The programme was re-named the Liberian Education Advancement Programme (LEAP) and is now in its fourth year and has now expanded across the country. The programme was evaluated using a randomized controlled trial. [25] [26]

Bridge won the Global Shared Value award for an “outstanding record in re-conceiving education for a new market” in Kenya over 2016.[27]

Costs for bridge schools net losses and revenues are estimated and are not released by the firm, with losses in 2016 estimated $12m a year and with a total revenue of $16m / year.

In 2017, the number of Bridge academies in Lagos, Nigeria increased. Bridge Liberia expanded to south-east Liberia. The internal M&E report revealed learning gains for Liberian pupils,[28][29] after four months. The RCT evaluation of the first year of PSL showed learning gains in Bridge-PSL schools, but while most providers in the public-private partnership kept students in oversubscribed schools and retained existing teachers, Bridge did not. Bridge removed pupils after taking control of schools with large class sizes, and removed 74% of incumbent teachers from their schools.[30] The third year of KCPE results were published with Bridge pupils outperforming their peers by 10 percentage points.

Governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki addresses a crowd of 7,000 graduating government qualified teachers at the Samuel Ogbemudia Stadium, Benin City for launch of the Edo Basic Education Sector Transformation (EdoBEST) initiative on October 10, 2018.

In 2018, Bridge pupils took part in Ugandan primary school exams for the first time and 100% of Bridge pupils passed. Bridge was selected as a technical delivery partner for the Nigerian education initiative EdoBEST that aims to transform education in Edo State.[31] Partnership Schools for Liberia was renamed Liberian Education Advancement Program (LEAP).

In 2020, for the third year, pupils who sat the Ugandan Primary Leaving Examination (PLE) outperformed the nationwide average.[32]

Approach

Bridge's approach uses a central team in each country to prepare content and monitor student progress. Bridge equips its teachers with a tablet onto which they download daily lesson plans and teacher guides up to two weeks in advance.[19]

The teachers guides set out the content and structure for each lesson.

A typical lesson consists of three parts[33]:

  1. A teacher demonstrates a concept or solves an equation;
  2. 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; and,
  3. The teacher then circulates around the classroom checking for understanding, assigning new questions for excelling children, and giving individual attention to struggling children.

Co-curricular activities

In addition to classroom lessons, the Bridge curriculum also includes extra-curricular activities such as sports, art, martial arts, music, and debate.[34]

Structure

Bridge is managed through a centralised system in each country, lowering the administrative costs for operating individual schools. Each Bridge school has only one administrative staff member, known as an Academy Manager, headteacher or Principal, who manages the school through a smartphone loaded with a custom-developed application that connects managers to a central cloud-based server.[35]

Using the custom application, Bridge can track student admissions and billing - in community schools - in real-time and serves as a financial management tool for the overall academy, including fee payments, expense management, and payroll. [36]

The rate of teacher absenteeism for Bridge schools is documented at less than 1%, whereas in Kenyan public schools according to World Bank research, absenteeism in the classroom is 47.3%.[37]

Monitoring and evaluation

Bridge uses technology and roving quality assurance teams to track learning outcomes.

The teacher guides monitor attendance, timing of lesson delivery, and pupil comprehension, which is uploaded daily onto the central server.[37]

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.[38]

Bridge uses this data on learning to not only improve its model, but also to contribute to wider pedagogy.

Learning gains

Observational evidence suggests that the longer pupils had been in a Bridge academy, the better they perform in their Kenyan KCPE exams:[39]

  • 5+ years at Bridge: Average Score of 293 and Pass Rate of 74.4%
  • 4+ years at Bridge: Average Score of 286 and Pass Rate of 74%
  • 3+ years at Bridge: Average Score of 274 and Pass Rate of 66.4%
  • 2+ years at Bridge: Average Score of 261 and Pass Rate of 58.3%

In July 2017, an internal M&E report, revealed learning gains achieved at Bridge Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) in just four months.[40]

The report reveals that in four months, students in Bridge PSL public schools could:

  • Read 7 more words a minute and answer 6% more questions correctly about the story they just read;
  • In maths, they solved 2.6 more addition problems & 2.2 more subtraction problems in a minute;
  • 17% of Bridge PSL public school second graders met reading fluency benchmark for the first time, compared to only 4% of second graders at traditional public schools;
  • 15% of Bridge PSL public schools students met reading comprehension benchmarks for the first time, compared to 4% of students at traditional public schools;
  • In reading, Bridge PSL public school students outperformed traditional public school students in reading by 0.77 standard deviations; and,
  • In maths Bridge PSL public school students outperformed traditional public school students by 0.18 standard deviations: that’s 50% more learning in 4 months.

Bridge PSL public school students made more progress toward achieving national literacy benchmarks.

Other outcomes

In Liberia, the experimental evaluation of the PSL program reveals that Bridge has a positive effect on students' learning. However, Bridge has a negative effect on pupil-level enrollment. In the first year this was due to mass un-enrollment of students in schools where enrollment was high and class sizes were large before Bridge arrived. After three years, students originally enrolled in partnership schools managed by Bridge were less likely to be enrolled in any school at all.[41]

Awards and acclaim

Bridge, as well as its founders, have received notable recognition through the winning of business awards and inclusion in internationally recognised reports and case studies.[42] Speaking to Quartz magazine in September 2019, explaining his 'ultimate recipe' for achieving global literacy, Bill Gates is quoted as saying: "the model of Bridge is promising, it’s far too small."[43]

Dr Shannon May was listed by the World Economic Forum at one of their 15 Women Changing the World.[54] In 2018, she was awarded a CEO Today, Business Women of the Year Award.[55]

In 2015, Jay Kimmelman was listed on the Goldman Sachs 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs.[56] In 2018, he was awarded an ACQ5 Gamechanger of the Year Award (Education; Africa).[53]

Criticism

Organisation has received criticism from different sources, including teaching unions and education rights groups. Education groups have pushed back on Bridge as using a model that stifles creativity, innovation, and goes against educational research in developed countries.[57][58] Critics have been accused of putting 'ideology before education'.[59]

After a statement by the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, in 2015, praising Bridge Schools, there was a large push-back from organisations in Kenya and Uganda, disagreeing with his statement, expressed deep concern over the global financial institution’s investment in a chain of private primary schools targeting poor families in Kenya and Uganda and called on the institution to support free universal education instead. [60]

Other have argued that their model, focused on guided instruction, actually allows for enhanced freedom similar to the way musicians use sheet music or actors have scripts.[61]

The company has come under criticism from aid agencies and civil rights groups, including ActionAid and Education for All, for being detrimental to the plan of offering a “universal, free and compulsory basic education” to all children.[62] Education International (EI), a global group of teachers’ unions, has criticised Bridge for its for-profit model being “morally wrong.” [63]”

Global Justice Now has criticized Bridge International Academies by suggesting that “the cost per student at just $6 dollars a month” is misleading. It states that 'the suggestion that $6 is an acceptable amount of money for poor households to pay reveals a profound lack of understanding of the reality of the lives of the poorest”. Global Justice Now calculated that for half their populations, the $6 per month per child it would cost to send [64] three primary school age children to a Bridge Academy, is equal to at least a quarter of their monthly income. Many families already struggle to provide three meals a day to their children. It has also claimed that the real total cost of sending one child to a Bridge school is between $9 and $13 a month, and up to $20 when including school meals. [65] The company has come under criticism from aid agencies and civil rights groups, including ActionAid and Education for All, for being detrimental to the plan of offering a “universal, free and compulsory basic education” to all children.[66]


Funding and investors

Bridge has received funding from a number of investors,[67] including:

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