Sam’s journey 

Positive comments about Correctbook! (written by Sam)

Today, we are going to visit three schools to see the impact Correctbook makes with our own eyes. Two years ago we started a cooperation with the organization called EPR, to supply schools with our writing material. Visiting ERP’s office and three of the schools today, will be a perfect opportunity to check whether the schools are still using Correctbook in the right way.

The EPR headquarters are just one street away from our hotel. When we arrive in the early morning, the president and vice president are already waiting for us. Both of them are pleased to welcome us and the staff have coffee and cake ready for us to celebrate our visit. Vice president Pascal tells us how happy he is  about what Correctbook is doing. In two years time as many as 27.000 children have been supplied with Correctbook’s writing material!

After this meeting, it is high time to go into the field. We are curious to know whether the Correctbook writing material in the school will  still be in good shape after two years of extensive use. We step into a big land cruiser and drive to the three schools. Two of them are located in the city of Kigali. The third one is situated outside of the city.

When we arrive at the first school, we sit down with the head teacher of the school first. We have a lot of questions for her, like:

• Are the Correctbook materials still being used at school?
• How do they experience the quality of the material after two years?
• Do the ink stations work well?
• Is there enough ink available to keep writing throughout the year?

We are very happy to hear a positive answer on every single question we have! When I started Correctbook and introduced new products like the ink station, I had no guarantee that the products would hold out as I expected them to. Especially the challenging circumstances in Africa, like the very high temperatures!

The second school we visit today, will be introduced to the Correctbook materials for the first time! We arrive at a moment when parents are waiting outside the school, as it is almost lunch time. In the classrooms we share the materials with the kids and while doing so,  I saw a boy looking at the Correctbook while my colleague Maarten was explaining how the product works. When the boy erased his notes with his cloth, his eyes became as big as they could. He turned around to his friend and they started laughing in amazement.

Finally we arrived at the third school, situated outside the city of Kigali. At this school we saw some difficulties. Children were taking the products outside of the school building, even though we instruct schools to store the products in the school at all times. Also, the pens were not refilled in the correct way. We instructed the head teacher of this school again, to make improvements to make the products last longer.

Seeing this, made it clear again that the success of our products highly depends on how they are used. We absolutely have to train teachers how to use and maintain the products. Correctbook tries to ensure these trainings by working with local partners who also understand the importance of this. We even have an instruction manual for the teachers now, showing them how to make sure the products are maintained so the quality can be guaranteed. In future we need to further improve in this area. We aim to cut costs by producing more material locally. This will make it possible to spend more budget on implementing the training in each location.

Correctbook has an important collaboration with Edukans, called Teaching with Impact. In this collaboration, Edukans takes care of the implementation part (including the training). As part of this cooperation we added a tested and proven learning method to the training called ‘active teaching’, making it an even broader learning method.