How do you call for help when you cannot make a call? A team of young school pupils from Aramoko District Commercial Secondary School in Ekiti State came up with an answer. Shake the phone. Their app, SafeGuardian, is designed to recognise that movement as a distress signal and send the user’s location to people they trust.
SafeGuardian took first place among pupils in their second year with Byte Busters, a coding programme for public school children run through the Odu’a Investment Foundation’s Digital Education for Innovation and Economic Development project, DEFINED. I travelled from the UK for its second annual showcase, held on Friday, 30 October, at the International Conference Centre of the University of Ibadan. Many of the young people whose work we saw are aged 12 to 16. Some had barely used a computer before they joined us.
And please take note of this: Aramoko is not Ado Ekiti, the capital city of Ekiti state. in fact, the average person reading this has probably never heard of Aramoko- until today. It underscores the range and depth of the possible, when talent meets access, and opportunity opportunity reaches the places we have scarcely thought to look. How many more Aramokos are waiting to astonish us?
Many of us went to public schools and took pride in them. Today, the words ‘public school’ can carry a judgement about the child before anyone has seen what the child can do. A school with too few working computers tells us something about the choices adults have made. It tells us very little about the intelligence of the pupils who go there. In Ibadan, those pupils gave us a better basis for judgement: their work.
Think about the problem the Aramoko team chose. When someone is being abducted or threatened, a phone may be within reach while its screen is impossible to use. The pupils designed SafeGuardian so that either a shake or the press of a button could trigger an alert. The app would obtain the user’s location, email it to trusted contacts and initiate calls to designated people. The technical work began with an act of imagination: putting themselves in the position of somebody for whom even dialling a number might be too much to ask.
The second prize went to pupils from Aje Comprehensive Senior Secondary School in Yaba, Lagos. Their project, SignBridge, uses AI to help people learn Nigerian Sign Language. They brought together interactive lessons, practice using a camera, English-to-sign translation, video resources and an AI tutor. I found the choice of problem as impressive as the choice of tools. A hearing person who cannot sign may assume that the Deaf person has a communication difficulty. The Yaba pupils saw a difficulty that both people share, and something the hearing person could learn to do about it.
The pupils from Abeokuta Grammar School, who came third, returned to the problem of getting help in an emergency. Their project, SOROSOKE, is designed to recognise cries for help in five languages: English, Nigerian Pidgin, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa. A person might shout ‘? gbà mí o!’ or ‘I dey danger.’ Using Google’s Teachable Machine, the pupils trained their system to recognise selected distress phrases. They designed alerts to carry a location and a time, with a link through which a trusted contact could acknowledge the message.
These young people understood two things a designer could easily miss. A person in distress will reach for the language that comes most readily to them. And sending a message is only part of getting help; someone has to receive it and act. I would like the teams working on emergency alerts to learn from responders, and the SignBridge pupils to develop their ideas further with Deaf users. A prize should open that door.
In the keynote published by this newspaper last Saturday, I spoke about moving from digital access to digital agency. The pupils made the distinction plain. They had learned enough about computers to ask what a computer could do about a problem they knew. That is a significant step for a teenager who started out learning to use a keyboard. It is also a reminder of what Nigeria stands to lose when the chance to take that step depends on the school a child can afford to attend.
Three years ago, Ambassador Dr Olatokunbo Awolowo Dosunmu, chair of the Odu’a Investment Foundation’s Advisory Council, invited me to lead the work that became DEFINED. At our first showcase, about 100 pupils represented nine centres. We now operate through 20 centres in 18 local government areas across all six South-West states, and the programme has reached more than 4,500 learners. We have learned a great deal as a team about what it takes to get a child from a first session to a project they can explain and defend. We should use that experience to reach more schools, and we should do so quickly.
That progress owes much to the Foundation, Odu’a Investment Company, its chairman, Dr Kola Kasali, immediate past chairman, Otuban Bimbo Ashiru, Group Managing Director Abdulrahman Yinusa, and Executive Secretray Mrs Abiola Ajayi, as well as the six owner states and their education ministries. I thank the principals, ICT teachers, mentors, volunteers and our project team, including assistant project manager Temilorun Okediji. The pupils’ work was judged by a panel chaired by Professor Kunle Idowu, Professor of Pharmaceutical Profiling and Informatics at the University of Ibadan. He was joined by Dr Shakirat Adesola, Dean of Science at the Federal College of Education (Special), Oyo; Michael Toyinbo, Director at Chowdeck; Abiodun Whesu, acting Managing Director of SWIT; and Odunayo Adeniji, Group Head of Human Resources at Odu’a Investment Company.
The next step begins with an honest look at what schools need. A donation of computers can get a club started. It takes working equipment, electricity, connectivity and a teacher with time to guide the pupils to keep it going. Our digital literacy training for teachers belongs in that effort. A pupil who has an idea on Tuesday should be able to return on Thursday, try it again and ask somebody for help. That ordinary continuity is how a child’s curiosity becomes a skill they can use.
The six South-West states can move now to identify the public schools that could host the next clubs and drive a multu-stakeholder mobilisation to equip, staff and sustain them. Businesses and old students’ associations can adopt centres and commit to their running costs beyond the opening ceremony. And the teams leaving Ibadan with promising projects should have somewhere to return for advice, testing and another attempt. The work of widening access and the work of developing the best ideas can proceed together.
There is a cost to taking our time. A pupil in the penultimate year of secondary school cannot wait three years for a computer club to reach her school. By then, the chance to learn alongside her classmates, with a teacher who knows her and time to try things out, will have passed. We should judge the pace of expansion by the years a child actually has in school.
I am proud of the pupils who won at the Ibadan showcase. I keep thinking, too, about the child who might have had a good answer to the Aramoko team’s question but has yet to sit at a computer long enough to find it. There are schools full of children we have scarcely given ourselves a chance to know. We have seen what happens when some of them get that chance. By the next showcase, we should be able to name the schools where we have given it to others.