SmartCoach is a mobile app-based platform for running large-scale teacher support programs in Ghanian schools, providing tools to track student learning progress and collaborate to improve it.
Organization’s Background and Achievements
This project is one of the 2024-2025 WISE Prize for Education semi-finalists.
Inspiring Teachers, founded by Simon Graffy, is driven by the vision of providing teachers with the support and tools they need to succeed. Drawing from his personal experience as a teacher and a late reader, Graffy understands the challenges faced by both educators and students in the classroom.
Key achievements include:
- Implementing the Inspiring Reading program, which delivers 150+ hours of structured literacy teaching each year.
- Rolling out SmartCoach to 56 schools in Cape Coast, Ghana.
- Conducting a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) across 40 schools in Ghana to evaluate their program’s effectiveness.
- Operating in three countries (Ghana, Uganda, and Zambia), demonstrating the scalability of their tools across different settings.
New Solution: SmartCoach
SmartCoach is an innovative mobile app-based platform designed to support large-scale teacher support programs in African schools. It provides educators with:
- Assessment tools
- A coaching system
- Dashboards for tracking student progress
The platform aims to shift from top-down, compliance-driven management to data-driven, outcomes-focused teacher support. SmartCoach uniquely integrates digital tools with printed materials in a hybrid approach, allowing for effective implementation even in classrooms without electricity.
Potential Impact and Prospects
In five years, they aim to roll out SmartCoach as part of national-scale literacy programs in partnership with Ministries of Education across Africa. They plan to use their testbed and demonstration programs to refine their tools while shifting to a sustainable model through flexible license fees. Moreover, the organization is developing a management portal to help Ghanaian District Education office teams use SmartCoach to manage the rollouts of foundational literacy and numeracy programs.
Addressing WISE Prize for Education Challenges
SmartCoach addresses the following WISE Prize challenges:
- Artificial Intelligence in Education
- Teaching of Arabic Language
- Foundational Literacies ☑️
The solution is directly linked to these challenges by using AI-driven tools to support teachers in improving foundational learning outcomes, particularly in literacy and numeracy.