Pupils at Ecole Primaire Saint Ignace
A group of eight young techies at Tech Africa has developed a technology-based school management system that will cover all aspects of the school’s administration, parenting, and student management thus improving the quality of education in Rwanda.
The system known as ‘School Box’ was launched in Kigali this February 17, 2023, which is accessible online, on Smart and USSD phones. It comes as a game changer in improving existing school management applications and technology in Rwanda which has focused on a few segments of the whole school management system.
For instance, one of Rwanda’s most popular education management systems – Urubuto application (developed by BK TecHouse, a subsidiary of the Bank of Kigali-BK Group) has 8 components on fees, school management, academics, communication, finance and accounting, library management and advanced analytics.
Other Online school management systems include Ireme, Flemish Association for Development Cooperation and Technical Assistance (VVOB), and Icyuzuzo.
School Box has 18 peculiar components and those include a student information management, course and class information, curriculum, communication, library management, discipline reports, and transcripts generator.
Other components are online learning and payment, fee management, document archival, parent portal, notifications to parents, progress monitoring, performance evaluation, data analysis, school identity card generator, and secure and easy access to data.
According to Vladimir Yann Bajeneza, the School Box Project Manager, the new system has many benefits which include improved administrative efficiency, enhanced communication, data access and security, student engagement, increased collaboration, parent engagement, and awareness of student information and behavior at school.
“The system helps to streamline processes and save time, money, and resources. With this system, schools will be able to provide an excellent learning environment and they will become more organized and efficient,” Bajeneza said.
As a special offer, Tech Africa says that they are providing free web design services and electronic school identity cards to every school that adopts Schoolbox as their management system. The schools can enjoy a one-year free trial period to test out the system and see the results for themselves
For schools without internet connection, the system is built in a way that it can be used without internet, the management system is installed in the computer and shows the notifications slightly later than when logged on internet.
The implementation of the School Box system will be done starting next week with the collaboration of Soleil Ltd, a local company that deals with government institutions to provide solutions and products aimed at implementing the country’s development vision as seen in the seven-year National Strategy for Transformation (NST 1) 2017-2024.
Parental engagement is the key to unlocking student success. Research shows that engaged parents increase student achievement by up to 30%, while a lack of parental involvement can lead to a higher risk of dropout and decreased potential.
Some parents told KTPress that the system notifications on all child and school happenings will enable them to monitor their children’s performance, as they take care of other businesses.
