Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu has said his administration borrowed the state’s e-learning platform, EKOEXCEL from Edo State.
He spoke at a recent Ekiti Investment and Economic Summit held in Ado-Ekiti, Ekiti State, highlighting the importance of peer reviews among governors and public officials.
Sanwo-Olu, in a panel of discussants alongside Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and Governors Godwin Obaseki of Edo State, Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti as well as Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State, disclosed that Lagos borrowed the idea of its e-education intervention, EKOEXCEL, from Edo.
He said that Obaseki introduced EdoBEST during his first term, saying that Lagos, having studied it carefully, went the same route with the same technical partner in 2019.
Sanwo-Olu said, “I usually acknowledge Governor Obaseki because I copied something that he introduced during his first tenure and which is working three times in Lagos education. He started EdoBEST, and he brought in Bridge (New Globe), an e-learning solution provider with tablets for basic education.
“So, you can see that indeed, we have started doing peer review. You don’t need to go to another country to copy what is working well in our country already. He brought the initiative, and we said we also need to start with basic education. We have copied that from Edo; it’s working well in Lagos, and we’ll scale it up.”
The governor said “we can check from the tablet what attendance we have in our schools, which teacher has come in; what time they clock in and what the lesson notes are. You can design the same curriculum irrespective of which part of the state the schools are in, so you can have the same quality in terms of input and the expected outcomes from education.”
Bridge, now rebranded as New Globe, is the technical partner managing the programme with the Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) having oversight functions.
Sanwo-Olu inaugurated EKOEXCEL in 2019 as part of his THEMES agenda, to provide quality education to both the rich and the poor across the state and upskill teachers leveraging cutting-edge technology.
EKOEXCEL has dramatically accelerated student literacy and numeracy performances, with significant differences between student performances in EKOEXCEL schools versus their peers in traditional schools.
EKOEXCEL students advanced in numeracy twice as fast as students in traditional schools. At the same time, they progressed three times as quickly as their peers in comparable schools.
This article appeared originally on PM News, Oct 26, 2021.
