Thousands of students in the Abutia Traditional Area are to benefit from cutting edge educational support platform, eCampus, following the donation of GHS2 million worth of subscriptions by the company.
The support was secured through the initiative of Tsiame Gakpe the Paramount Linguist of the area as part of its 2024 Easter Festival celebrations.
Mr. Cecil Senna Nutakor, Founder and Chief Executive of the Company who led some executives to present the donation on Easter Monday, said more than 1,300 students would receive free year-long subscriptions to the award-winning platform that enables teachers and other stakeholders to measure learning outcomes.
He said the highly interactive mobile and web-based application was designed for all levels of education with thousands of questions and academic exercises including videos and podcasts that would help teachers prepare their students.
“eCampus is a technology that helps measure, analyse and predict your readiness for examinations, employment and compliance. eCampus in 2024 has decided to work with traditional leaders to see how we can improve education at the community and rural levels.
“We want to support the entire Abutia community. Anybody that lives in Abutia – even in the diaspora, can take advantage,” he said.
The community leaders made an appeal for smart devices to aid patronage of the program, and the CEO said data generated from usage would enable the Company to identify the needs and work to provide support.
He said the company had access to some major device manufacturers and has a long-standing partnership with Telecel Global that allows usage of eCampus without data charges across 5 African countries including Ghana.
“We are negotiating with other data service providers to scrap charges for the app’s usage”. he emphasised.
Mr. Nutakor, therefore, encouraged all including parents to avail smart devices for the use of the app and said students should endeavour to make the most of the opportunity.
“The results are data driven so let’s focus on letting the children use it. Teachers should use it too, and the spillover will be great. User behaviour data on the platform will unlock additional opportunities for the community.
“All you can do for your community is to just learn. Just learn and earn points”,
Present at the occasion were some teachers, head teachers and students, in addition to assembly members and other stakeholders – all whom commended the linguist for the vision, and were confident the support would impact the growth of education and that of the Abutia communities.
Togbe Adza Asamoah Konta Kokroko III, the Asafofiaga (warlord) of Abutia, promised to find strategies to ensure “every child benefits.
“We have won a lottery. Let’s work hard to ensure our children benefit. Let us embrace it and see if our children would improve,” he said.
The warlord pledged a personal donation of some computers to aid the project.
Togbe Okai Debrah III, a divisional Chief of Abutia Teti, said the traditional leaders would encourage parents to support their children to access the app, adding, “the world is advancing towards a computer age and teaching and learning is going virtual”.
Tsiame Gakpe, the Paramount Linguist, told the Ghana News Agency that the CEO, who was a primary schoolmate at Mawuli Primary School in Ho, agreed to support his vision for education for the area, and that traditional leaders of Abutia had endorsed the initiative.
He said the traditional area considered education a more viable investment that would guarantee general development and appealed to the Government to support with needed devices and structures including school infrastructure and reliable electricity supply to power the devices.
eCampus became an app in 2015 and presently has some 80,000 user subscriptions.
Mr. Nutakor shared with the GNA how the Company had successfully undertaken several deployments for various educational institutions including nursing and midwifery training colleges and the Ghana School of Law.
He said the Company kept expanding its scope into other fields, such as compliance as a service (CaaS) for corporate organisations, the financial sector anti-money laundering and cyber fraud, and product knowledge training and assessment for consumer goods (FMCGs) and insurance companies.
“So, something that started basically to just help people pass exams has now evolved into a holistic solution to empower entire societies and serves as a bridge between industry and academia. We believe extending this to the community level and building up from there working strongly in collaboration with our traditional rulers could create much more impact”.
The CEO said the brand was privileged “to be a part in this shift in how our traditional leaders perceive development,” and added that the Company would pursue collaboration with traditional leaders as “a more formal and intentional strategy going forward”.
Mr. Nutakor also appealed to the Government to support the initiative to spread the net of digital transformation across rural communities.
