A Is for Abuse: The Saga of For-Profit Schooling in Africa

Deconstructed

The Intercept

News

4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bridge International is the largest for-profit education chain in the world, serving upward of 750,000 children in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Liberia, and India. The founders, two Harvard graduates, developed an attractive business model for investors. With centrally-produced curriculum and bare-bone standardized schoolhouses, Bridge offered a vision of making a profit while doing good. But then rumors started to swirl about the dark side of the company.

This week on Deconstructed: Journalists Neha Wadekar and Ryan Grim narrate the saga of Bridge International Academies. As allegations of sexual abuse and neglect emerged against Bridge, investor responsibility became the center of a controversy at the World Bank.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Between 700 million and 800 million children living in poverty across the globe, the majority
0:10.7	of those children are not accessing a reasonable education.
0:14.9	In the early days of the era of big tech disruption, two Harvard graduates dreamed up a bold
0:19.7	experiment in education.
0:21.7	In 2007, we came to Africa where due diligence had showed us that there were an incredibly
0:29.4	high number of enrolled children who were still illiterate upon graduation.
0:35.5	And was there a possible business model that could solve this?
0:38.8	Was there something that could be done even though people said there wasn't anything that
0:42.8	could be done?
0:44.4	That was Shannon May.
0:45.7	She studied education development in rural China and she spied an untapped global opportunity.
0:51.1	She teamed up with her husband, Jay Kimmelman, an education software developer.
0:55.2	If you go direct to that family, you can need the service and you figure out what their
0:59.4	problem is and you create that service.
1:02.4	And then you could have a business because you can charge them the fee that's affordable
1:05.6	for their current income levels and change their life in their children's lives.
1:10.1	In an MIT case study that opens with children running around informal settlements, more
1:15.7	commonly known as slums in the West, may details their vision and how they accomplished it.
1:21.6	We all moved to Nairobi in 2008 and within six months we had the first school up and running.
1:30.2	The couple did the math and found that parents of impoverished children around the globe were
1:33.6	spending tens of billions of dollars a year on schooling. They would go on to start a bridge
1:38.2	international academies.
	...

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