There are a whole lot of people who do not have access to education in Nigeria. Statistics show that about 10.5 Million children were out of School as at 2010. This is the exact problem Passnownow.com plans to tackle as this is the first time the actual instructional subject content in the government approved syllabus and curriculum in the sequential order in which they are taught in class will be published on the internet in Nigeria, perhaps even West Africa.
The EdTech company would address the problem of access to educations for millions of underserved Nigerian Children in rural an urban communities by making all subjects available on web and mobile. According to Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji, Founder of Passnownow.com, “Our recent widespread acceptance around the rural and urban parts of the Country especially amongst students and teachers makes us scalable and sustainable in the long term, a weekly steady 65% incremental growth and being the only core education content focused Edtech portal in Nigeria, we are excited to see it fast evolving into the Khan Academy and Coursera of Africa.”
She also stated that “we hope to raise enrollment numbers & reduce the current poor academic performance of students & the drastic failure rates in exams while also working to improve Instructional Practice by training & empowering teachers for the overall competitive advantage of our Country in terms of her work force and her long term development.”
Passnownow.com is working at a very auspicious period, as, very little commitment has been shown by the Governments at various levels about the staggering number of people – children – who cannot afford to go to school or whose schools lack the human and materials resources in addition to the lack of qualified and professional teachers in Nigeria.
With the tools that this platform provides, hundreds of thousands of Teachers in public schools are able to use class notes online to teach in Classrooms, parents nudge their children to study via web and mobile to augment class lessons & students studying all their school subjects on the Internet.
Furthermore, users can revise and prepare for entry level Exams which form prerequisites to gain admission into Institutions of higher learning like WAEC, UTME, NECO and more on Passnownow.com. The portal also has a feature which encouraged and mobilizes educated, well meaning, working class citizens to contribute their quota by volunteering to teach students in their various communities across the Country, provides users grammar tips and contains a leader-board to accurately measure degree of usage but its subscribers.
It feels really good to see Tech Companies addressing this debilitating problem of access to education in Nigeria.