Management Problems that Schools in Africa Face

A typical school in Tanzania, and indeed in Africa, is normally faced with problems at a very grass root level:  Lack of teachers, lack of proper buildings, furniture, books as well as other literature material. Furthermore, there is normally a breakdown or very poor communication between schools and the relevant supervisory bodies, such as the Ministry of Education. This is attributed to poor infrastructure and communication means that exist in Africa. This means that, management of the school by the Headmaster or Headmistress and supervision of schools by the Ministry of Education are a very heavy burden. Almost impossible.

Through the development and implementation of Flying Colours, Sieci Limited seeks to address two of the problems just highlighted. Namely management of schools and supervision of schools. Following is an overview of Flying Colours. However, Flying Colours is still under development. The first release of Flying Colours is expected in December 2008. Two schools have shown interest.

Flying Colours -an Overview

 From the school's point of view, Flying Colours is a computer system that is designed to help schools manage school activities. The school activities in question start at the point of pupil or student enrolment, all the way to graduating from school. i.e. issues of Enrolment, timetable, attendance, discipline, student performance from classroom tests to final national examinations. The system will also help monitor teacher performance in terms of attendance, subjects taught and student performance at each of the subjects that a teacher teaches. A module to manage school finances (e.g. school fees) and a module to help parents and guardians participate in a student's school life are envisaged. 

Flying Colours is designed to use the lowest common factor in terms of Information Technology (IT). The bare truth is that schools in Africa cannot afford to invest in IT due to costs involved. i.e. no money to purchase modern hardware and software, let alone money for training and maintenance charges. Flying colours will be designed to run on meagre computer resources so that computer technology that is phased out of Government and private firms may easily find its way into schools. We are looking at a system that may run on such platforms as Windows 95/NT and Intel Pentium I processors if not  Intel x486. 

Flying Colours is a two-tier (client-server) application. The client and server may reside on one machine so that at a minimum, a school need only have one PC to successfully utilise Flying colours. The system will also be able to operate in a network environment. The server will host the database while the client will host the application interface to manipulate the database. This will mean that any ODBC compliant database may be used, including Microsoft Access. There will be two types of Interfaces (clients) to operate on the database (server): A traditional client out of a 4GL language, e.g. Microsoft Access, and a web based client so that the database may be operated from a standard browser. This way, it will be possible to operate the system across an IP based technology, such as the Internet. Even parents will be able to gauge a child's performance through the Internet. Parents will no longer have to wait for the end of term report or to be summoned to school.

From a school supervisor point of view, Flying Colours is a tool that will help collect relevant data from schools for analysis and supervision purposes. There will be two ways to feed data into the database residing at the supervisor's premises: 
1. Through manual keying in of data or the importation of data from a file that was generated by Flying colours at school. The file may be uploaded through a browser from any internet access point. The supervisor will have to give access to relevant authorities of each school so that they may access the system over the Internet to key in or upload data.
2. It will also be possible to key in data manually. 

Flying Colours residing at the supervisor's premises will also be a two-tier system just like its counterpart at school. The only difference is that the latest technology will be used to build it. This is primarily because it will manage a whole lot more data. Furthermore, the supervisor should be in a relatively better position to invest in the latest technology. 

In order to make the Flying Colours project viable and self sustaining, costs will have to be kept at a minimum. Therefore, as a cost reduction measure, the school supervisor (Ministry of Education) officials may be sufficiently trained by Sieci Limited to train all the other system users from each school. Users from several schools may be trained collectively.

In researching on this project, Sieci Limited also talked to some officials in the Ministry of Education but off-record. They showed interest. The major stumbling block as far as they were concerned would be funds to implement this project on a country wide scale. This is especially true when taking into account that most schools are in rural areas where there is not even electricity.  In spite of this stumbling block, Sieci Limited still sees that this project is viable whereby, Flying Colours will be implemented as a system to be sold off-the-shelf. Therefore, Sieci will let schools that can afford to purchase the system for the sole purpose of managing school activities. The cost will be low so that schools that can rally support (e.g. sponsorship) or private schools can afford it. As for the Ministry of Education, if things will turn out well in future so that can join, well and fine. 

It is the intension of Sieci Limited to keep the total cost of ownership of Flying Colours at a minimum so that every school can afford it. It is intended that the more the schools that will participate, the lower  the cost. To this day, two schools have shown interest in the project and they are taking part in helping develop the system: One primary school and a secondary school.

For more information on flying colours, please contact Sieci Limited as shown on the company web site at http://www.sieci.com.