ECTA is my long-term effort to change that — working toward data-driven, genuinely personalised education, starting with Nigeria and the wider African context. It is not a company or a product. Right now it is a question I keep returning to, and a small amount of research pointed at it.
Attendance registers. Continuous assessment scores. Term reports. Exam results. Schools across Nigeria — and most places — already gather more information about each student than any teacher could hold in their head.
Then it stops. The data goes into a file, a cupboard, or a spreadsheet nobody opens again. It gets used to rank students at the end of term, and that is roughly where its usefulness ends.
So the questions that actually matter go unanswered. Which students are quietly falling behind, months before it shows up in a final grade? Which ones are struggling with the subject rather than the teaching? Where is a whole class stuck on the same misunderstanding? A teacher with thirty or sixty students cannot see this by intuition alone, and we currently give them nothing that helps.
The result is a system that measures children constantly and understands them barely at all.
These are the sentences I keep hearing. Pick the one that lands closest — it tells me which problem is worth chasing first.
One answer per browser. Results show as soon as you pick.
Personalised education is not a new idea. A tutor working with one child has always done it naturally — noticing where the child struggles, adjusting, going back over what did not land. What has never existed is a way to do that for millions of students at once.
That is the gap I think data and software can genuinely close. Not to replace teachers, and not to automate judgment away from them, but to give a teacher the thing a one-to-one tutor has and a classroom teacher never does: a clear view of where each student actually is.
What that could look like in practice — surfacing a struggling student early enough to intervene, showing a teacher which concept a class has collectively missed, giving a school a picture of what is working rather than only who scored highest, and giving education ministries something more useful than aggregate pass rates.
This ties directly into why I do any of this. Data and software are only interesting to me where they serve human development. Education is the clearest case of that I know.
There is no product. There is no funding, no team, no pilot school, and no launch date. I would rather say that plainly than dress this page up as something further along than it is.
What exists right now is the problem statement above, a growing amount of reading and research, and conversations with people who work inside education systems and see this from the inside.
The next step is not to build software. It is to find out whether the problem I think exists is the problem educators actually have. That means talking to teachers, administrators and researchers, and listening for the same frustration said back to me in different words.
If you work in education, that is where you can help — and it is worth more to this than any code I could write today.
No word limit, no format. The specific, annoying, day-to-day version is more useful to me than the polished version. You don't have to leave your name or your email.
Leave your email and I'll share progress as it happens. If you want to be more involved than that, tick whatever applies — it genuinely shapes who I reach out to.
Shared anonymously by people working inside education, with their permission. Nothing here is edited beyond removing anything identifying.
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