Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starship rocket — which could one day carry humans to the moon and Mars — made it some four minutes and 24 miles into the sky before it exploded during its inaugural test flight last Thursday.

And yet, even as they watched the world’s largest rocket burst into a fireball, SpaceX engineers still roared with cheers and applause.

The launch was hailed as “a real accomplishment” and “so successful”.

Why?

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary,” SpaceX later tweeted.

SpaceX said before the mission that “any data it yielded would be valuable as long as the rocket cleared the launch pad” — which it did.

This is where the lessons come from – SpaceX engineers went for the ‘data’, not necessarily for the Starship Rocket to hit the moon and/or Mars on the first launch. Now they have the data, expect them to be more accurate in the next launch!

The Need for accurate data:

Data helps a company redefine its strategy, increase their revenue and profits by making the company more efficient, providing key insights into operations and customer satisfaction and helping to improve certain processes. 

​​Data can help businesses measure whether certain actions, products or services are profitable and where their greatest expenses might be. Identifying expenses is often the key to increasing profits because businesses can reduce those expenses and keep more of the revenue they earn. Raw data helps the company identify where it can trim expenses, increase efforts and earn more revenue. 

Again, that is why stakeholders in the education sector in Nigeria were full of praise for the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and its technology partners, Sidmach Technologies, following the development of Edustat platform.

I tell you why: Data plays a critical role in problem-solving for company leaders. With an abundance of data, company leaders can identify and address key problems and monitor the effects of proposed solutions.

Solving problems can be much easier and solutions are more effective when the person solving that problem has sufficient information. Understanding the problem in its entirety is typically the first step toward solving that problem.

That is why the SpaceX team didn’t bury their heads in sand when the Spaceship Rocket ‘failed’. Are you in the EdTech space in Nigeria? Edustat presents you with a dataset to rave-up your products/services.

Edustat is a data and Artificial Intelligence-driven analytics platform that offers rich and unique smart statistical insights into education and assessment in West Africa using historical and current data to provide detailed intelligence for stakeholders across the globe in a smart and easily accessible manner. It offers a variety of rich, interactive educational assessment statistics, and insights, in graphs, summaries, tables, trends and interactive dashboards for intelligence, research, and informed decision-making in just a few clicks.

WAEC, in partnership with Sidmach, developed Edustat with ease of use in mind. So, it was built for users to easily sign up, and select the kind of report or intelligence they seek, with an array of filters to filter down the expected result by age, gender, demography, and even special needs amongst many other options of filters.

Values Edustat offers users

Everyone can benefit from Edustat, but let’s highlight a few: Researchers/academics (PhD students, professorship, masters) – We all know it is usually difficult to access accurate data that cover education statistics in gender, disabilities, regions, male/female and other indexes. Researchers will have cause to smile because Edustat contains more than just statistical numbers; you are assured of infographics.

The team infused a summary of any insight or report you generate using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.

The opportunities are numerous. Governments at all levels – Federal, State, LGA; MDAs, are welcome to use Edustat.

For instance, the Ogun State Government wants to assess the state’s performance in SSCE over the years. They can compare their State with other States for developmental planning, and interventions (in case the students are not doing well in certain subjects like English, Mathematics, etc).

A State Government that pays WAEC fees its students would cherish having accurate data on their performances.

Funding Agencies – The World Bank, UNESCO, DFID, etc., who are looking for reliable data for interventions for scholarships, erect classrooms/ this will help for informed decisions.

Schools are not left out. Schools would want to know how they perform in WAEC; maybe for the bragging rights of 9As or other achievements. This will help them compare with other schools. They can track how their female students are performing; how the students (generally) are doing per subject; juxtapose their performance to others.

The team really worked hard to integrate AI Predictive Modelling, so schools shall be able to predict how students will perform in future high school assessments – known as WAEC school exams.

Also, Parents who moved to new locations do not know which School to pick for their kids. Worry not; you can assess schools’ performance in WAEC through Edustat.

Private Corporate/Individuals – Any company that does anything on Education like Edcent, uLesson, Edusko, will help them build, and scale up their products, contents, or solutions around subjects.

They can ascertain how candidates perform in each subject in real time.

It is a web-based application for now, but it can be assessed from any device, Laptop, Phone, Tablet etc. It is adaptive to any device and provides everyone with the same experience across all devices.

Edustat offers Pay Per Report. What that means is that you only need to pay for the insight/report you are seeking per time.

But again, with the ease of use in mind, the team built the product with a wallet system which allows users to fund their wallets with sufficient funds which allows them to pay for the statistics/reports/insights they seek by drawing funds from their funded wallet automatically.

So, what are you waiting for, sign up on Edustat (https://waec.edustat.ng/) today!

Education data typically involves data compiled from schools on graduation rates, drop-out rates, test score averages, and the most vital – external examination performances.

Often, education data is used to measure the success of a State, Region, Institutions or Individuals and benchmark them against others to improve your own work, products, or processes.

Nowadays, most States publish annual report ‘detailing’ education data meant to hold schools accountable, but why are the students’ success rates at examinations not improving?

It simply means there’s a problem. The information presented in most of these annual reports or scorecards are not always reliable. And the fault lies in the way the data is sourced, compiled and presented.

What exactly goes wrong? How does data become inaccurate? And where can students, parents, schools, researchers, businesses and the government get accurate data about schools’ performances with regards to learning and examinations in Nigeria?

Missing Data

I can boldly say that the ‘missing data’ is at the ‘vault’ of the 71-year-old West African Examinations Council (WAEC) established in 1952 to be a world-class examining body, adding value to the educational goals of its stakeholders. How?

Yes, many reports churn out of researches or academic exercises lack sufficient and accurate data. In many cases, data was not available on demographics like gender, ethnicity, income level, or disabilities. On top of that, most reports can point to the exact key performance indicators.

Takeaway > Many challenges in the educational sector will remain unsolved without access to accurate data. Data!

Let’s break it down: Increase in infrastructural decay, limited resources including personnel, and/or adequate funding in the education sector are traceable to lack of accurate, adequate and real-time access to data for planning and decision-making.

The UN recently released a damning report that only 15 percent of Nigerians have access to electricity, while UNESCO states that only 24 percent receive secondary education or higher.

What statistics like these throw to our faces are the reasons an overwhelming number of Nigerian children lack access a basic education, even in a 21st Century world. 

Therefore, a data-driven approach can help address problems such as the lack of infrastructure by using local statistics to identify areas where progress can be made.

For corporate organisations, sometimes it takes just one individual to come up with an innovative new approach that gives your organisation the competitive edge, but more often than not, it requires the collaboration of various different teams and the combination of lots of different data sources.

In today’s fast-paced and artificial intelligence (AI) driven world, most executives agree data-driven operations across lines of business is key to a winning strategy.

Illustrating that point is the 85% increased investment in digital capabilities and 77% increased investment in IT, as reported in the 2022 Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey. Giving your employees the ability to access and make sense of their data, whether they sit within technical teams or not, is therefore crucial to your success.

Your data needs to be democratised across the business, although this is often harder than it would seem.

According to New Vantage Partners’ Data and AI Leadership Executive Survey 2022, only 27% of organisations have managed to nail this, with another 19% struggling to establish a data culture.

Through 2025, 80% of organisations seeking to scale digital business will fail because they don’t take a modern approach to data and analytics governance, as stated by Gartner’s State of Data and Analytics Governance.

Unfortunately, modernising tech stacks and migrating to the cloud are not enough to put the right data in the right hands of everyone across the business. Organisations must modernise their governance practices to fully uphold their efforts.

For instance, if an Education Technology (EdTech) startup can find out why there aren’t enough schools in a certain area, they can use census data to determine how many students live there.

Upon completion of that phase, they move further to collaborate with government officials to work out what must be done — maybe constructing more schools or finding ways to transport students who currently walk long distances to school each day.

How about researchers? It is a no-brainer that ‘poor quality data can have serious effects on later analysis. Data containing errors of commission or omission have the potential of throwing off analytical calculations, which may then lead to incorrect conclusions’.

Real-Time Access to Data is the Solution

The best way to describe this is to see education data as an apparatus that receives and uses inputs to help run the educational process, producing outputs that tangible and/or measurable. Data use deepens critical thinking and decision-making by parents, teachers, students, educational institutions, researchers, donor agencies/NGOs, businesses and the government.

Thus, collecting and analyzing data to determine why children are out of school will allow you to take actionable steps to reduce these numbers. For example, if you find that many young girls drop out after their first menstruation cycle (usually around age 12 or 13), you can focus resources on providing private sanitation facilities for girls at their schools.

This will help eliminate hygiene-related reasons for young girls dropping out of school and ensure they stay engaged with education.

By collecting data about why children aren’t enrolled in school, it is possible to make informed decisions about how best to address your target population’s needs.

You can also use data to measure how effective interventions have been in reducing dropout rates. This information can be used by decision-makers to create programs tailored specifically for your region and local culture.

In addition to focusing on specific groups based on location and demographics, you can collect data from each student who has dropped out of school.

So, innovative solutions informed by high-quality data and evidence can help improve school performance and keep children in school, especially those who are most at risk of dropping out.

Currently, 1 in 6 Nigerian students is not enrolled or attends irregularly, but with proper attention to data, concerned stakeholder can make sure that not one more Nigerian child has to grow up without an education. This will require political will, effective planning, and coordination between federal and state government officials as well as local communities.

Well, there is light at the end of the tunnel, as the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), is taking the bull by the horn through the introduction of an artificial intelligence-driven Education Statistics (EduStat) platform. Find out about more about the potentials of EduStat in my next piece…

About the writer:

*Peter Oluka is the Editor of TechEconomy, a Lagos-based media startup. You can follow Peter on Twitter @PeterOlukai.

Pan-Atlantic University (PAU) organised a Thanksgiving Mass Service on Thursday, November 3, 2022, as part of the events commemorating its twentieth anniversary.

The Mass was celebrated by the Archbishop of Lagos Diocese, Archbishop Alfred Adewale Martins. Fr Tony Odoh, the Chaplain of Pan-Atlantic University, Professor Enase Okonedo, the Vice-Chancellor Pan-Atlantic University and other top officials of Pan-Atlantic University received the Archbishop and led him on a tour of the university’s new projects and facilities. 

The official entourage comprised the immediate Past Vice-Chancellor, Professor Juan Elegido – the current Vice-Chancellor; Professor Enase Okonedo, – Dean, Lagos Business School; Professor. Chris Ogbechie, Deputy Dean- LBS; Prof. Yinka West, The Registrar; Mr Kingsley Ukaoha, Prof. Chantal Epie, Fr Ignatius Sotos, Fr Paul Ariole, Fr Ifeanyi Ogboh and Fr Leo Ogbanufe.

The tour activities anchored by Mr Frank Wiggle (Head of Community Relations, Pan-Atlantic University) commenced with a visitation to the in-house audiovisual studio for media and film production students and a visit to the new School of Science and Technology laboratories, which includes the Electrical/Electronic lab, Physics and science lab, and a newly equipped Computer Science lab with different scientific apparatus to prepare students with modern-day skills to practice their professional endeavours. 

The anniversary Mass commenced with melodious hymns led by the PAU Chapel Choir, the procession of the Archbishop and the officiating ministers.

The Most Rev. Adewale Martins welcomed the distinguished members of the board, staff, students, and other participants to the 20th Thanksgiving Mass.

Also, he commended the unique leadership virtues of the management and faculty in carrying out training and character-moulding policies to build the young students at one of the formative stages of their lives with such bold grace and opportunity bestowed on them by God.

  “Whatever we do in such an institution as faculty members or staff in our areas, we become co-workers with God in bringing new creatures into being; Creatures that would have become new because the values and virtues that we may have succeeded in impacting on them”, He remarked.

The Mass ended with a vote of thanks speech by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Enase Okonedo. She appreciated the Archbishop of Lagos, Rev. Adewale Martins; Fr Tony Odoh- Regional Vicar of Opus Dei in Nigeria and Chancellor of the PAU- the secretary to the Archibishop – Fr Paul Ariole; the school Chaplain- Rev. Father Ifeanyi Ogboh, Rev. Leo Ogbanofe, and the project committee members that organised the event.

The Vice-Chancellor proceeded to acknowledge and thank the board of trustees of the PAU Foundation- Professor Steven Afolami, the immediate Past Vice-Chancellor of PAU, Professor Juan Elegido, who was one of the three (3) founding members of Lagos Business School – the first Alumni Director of Lagos Business School- Mr Gabriel Diejomaoh, Deans of Schools, heads of units as well as the altar servers, churchwardens, chaplaincy and PAU choir.

Pan-Atlantic University (PAU) was established in 2002. The objective of education in Pan-Atlantic University is the well-rounded formation of the human person.

The University aims at nurturing individuals who are professionally competent, creative and enterprising, zealous for the common good and able to make free and morally right decisions and who thus act as positive agents of change in service to society.

Currently, Pan-Atlantic University has seven main units:

–           Lagos Business School (LBS)

–           Enterprise Development Centre (EDC)

–           School of Media and Communication (SMC)

–           School of Management and Social Sciences (SMSS)

–           School of Science and Technology (SST)

–           Institute of Humanities (IOH)

–           Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art (YSMA)