by Usman Alabi

Joseph Agunbiade is the co-founder and Head of Technology at BudgIT, a civic startup that is moulding conversation around government budget. He is also the founder of SmartED, a startup that is fusing technology and education for young children.

In this interview with YNaija’s #Impact365 series, Agunbiade talks about BudgIT, SmartED and the journey so far.

Could you tell us more about how you and Seun started BudgIT?

BudgIT started as an event organized by CCHub… I submitted idea, Seun submitted, we had not met then but his idea was selected mine was not. So we got an email saying that if you can build a tech guy, but your idea was not selected please endeavour to find an idea that was selected that you can be a part, that was why I chose budget for you, that was the name then and then we met, that was how it all started before the name changed to BudgIT,

You are the tech guy, how did you connect technology to governance and citizenship?

Largely that is Seun’s beat, bringing in data and telling me what he wants to see and as the tech guy, I know when I am given data, I know what I can achieve with what he has given us. To the best of knowledge, we tried when we started to represent this data in our own best possible way as at that time that can help citizen to understand, the goal was very simple, to simplify the budget, we believe that when the budget is simplified, the citizen can understand and when they understand, they can demand for transparency and accountability from our leaders, that was the goal, that was pretty much what we are able to do

How about SmartED, could you please explain the concept?

SmartED basically started in March this year, the goal is to create and simplify learning, basically create an alternative. You go to school you don’t have a good teacher and you are doomed by that already or you go to school, you don’t have a particular teacher, having a bad teacher is problem on its own, so bad teacher and then no teacher, these are conditions our schools are plagued with. From my experience I understand that it is a digital approach, everybody can be included regardless of age, we thought of creating an inclusive system, with digital technology, you don’t need to worry about having teacher or not, so we are getting the best teachers in Lagos here to work together with us to create interactive learning, so we call smart head a digital school so as to create this learning that is inclusive, interactive and it’s fun, right now we focus on basic education, primary school because we feel that is the foundation for every other learning. We wanted to take all the subjects in primary school initially, but when we took off, we realized that it’s a lot of work, so we zero down to mathematics and English which is what we are doing right now, we know English is very universal, so we look at the aspect that is very local. The way our App is built, we have ‘read for yourself’ and ‘read for me’, under the read for me thing, you can learn the right pronunciation of words and learn how to construct a proper sentence.

Essentially, is it free?

We are looking at it in two dimension, for public schools, we are looking at how we can serve them that content for free but kids in private schools are gonna pay for our content. The reason is that kids in private schools can afford it, public school students cannot afford it and we think that the content should also get to them too, secondly that is our sustainability plan as an organization, so far we have run for seven months and for these months, we have been funding this from our pocket. We are also seeking partnership with donor agency, and secondly we seek to make it available in other mediums. We have three core projects in smart head, we have what we call technology support, with this we building software to aid technology and to bring technology into class rooms, there is a software we are building now that has not been released, we did a survey, we asked teachers what is the biggest problem they have in their day to day activities, they talked about their lesson note, updating it, you have to start all over again because you are writing it, so we are building an app that allows him to write and when it’s time to update , he basically edit.  We also have open project, with this we partner with an architectural firm and they have designed a model of what a primary school should look like, there is an international partner is working in education in Nigeria that got global partnership in education, they are investing some millions of dollars but they are focusing on six states that has more educational deficits, they come in, they give a lot of money to give our people who in turn just build shabby schools with few and substandard class rooms, thus not able to account for the money, we believe that this affect the environment where a child would learn, so what we are doing is that we have designed a model, and then turn it into a three 3D because an agricultural design might not appeal to everyone. But in three 3D It is visually appealing, it shows a basic village school, so now we would do the costing of how much it would cost to do such a thing, this we would do by bringing in a quantity surveyor, it would now be an open school project that would be available. We would then do advocacy so that donors can see these things so next time when they want to come and invest money, they won’t just invest money, but they can use this as a minimum standard they are expecting from the contractor who is doing this project, and then we can always update it as things changes, what are the things that class rooms must have, what does a school environment look like, what kind of furniture.

But so far, has there been any positive reactions to all these?

This is not a public information yet, we have not publish it to schools, what we have done is that we have run a test on it, there was a school in Abuja where we try to digitize what they do and see parents’ response and all that, we have built the technology but the schools have not started using it. Our major challenge is funds, apart from funds another challenge we face would have been skills, but skills are available, we just need funds to get them, we can always train people, hence funds is the fundamental challenge we face in smart head, presently we don’t have full time animator, because we don’t have the funds to bring such skill in, we might have other challenges in the future, but presently funds is the major challenge.

Mazi Emeka