Our Model – Imani Schools

The key to Imani Academies’ success lies in our business model that leverages on scale, reducing costs to a level that can dramatically extend access and improve quality.

Imani Academies was founded from day one on the premise of this massive market opportunity, knowing that to achieve success, we would need to achieve a scale never before seen in the education sector in Uganda. From the beginning, we have invested huge amounts of capital in research, development, technology, and curriculum. It’s imperative to continue this rigorous development process until the highest levels of academic performance and operational effectiveness are achieved so that all the pupils receive the same level of education at all our locations.

Using technology and data, Imani drives enormous efficiencies both in terms of the overhead costs required to run an academy and in terms of increasing the quality of the output. For example, at the academy level, an Imani Academy has only one employee involved in management – the Academy Manager. The vast majority of non-instructional activities that an Academy Manager would normally have to deal with (billing, payments, expense management, payroll processing, prospective admissions, and more) are all automated and centralized to a custom backend ERP. This systemization frees our Academy Manager to focus on the critical work that must be executed locally – overseeing classroom instruction and building and managing relationships with parents and the local community.

Our model focuses on:

The Teacher Resource Center (TRC)

The TRC is the online home for the Imani learning program. It contains a comprehensive set of quality lessons for each subject across every class. These lesson plans are authored by Imani super teachers and are specific to the learning model. The lesson plans and the aggregation of them in one central resource, allows Imani to distribute quality teaching resources to every teacher. It simplifies the process of lesson planning and creates common standards across the Imani network. With the TRC, Imani wishes to create a community of practice where teachers can build on the initial materials and upload and share new resources.

Professional development:

Training programs are designed for teachers and school leaders. These programs are aligned to the methodology of Imani Academies, and are aimed at attending the needs of the teachers. Teachers are retrained using new teaching and classroom management techniques and supported 24/7 by their school leader. They also benefit from ongoing training and continuous support both in and out of the classroom.

Assessments:

Imani applies standardized tests to students twice a term, to measure student performance and see if the innovations are having impact on the improvement of student learning and achievement. Also, this area designs the pilots that need to be done before large scale implementation of the pedagogic innovations. Along these lines, there are class observations and tests with control group design, that are being applied to students, to measure the impact.

Infrastructure:

The infrastructure of all our schools is of optimum quality. All schools are built from scratch with suitable materials for childcare. Our infrastructure is designed to support the good development of our methodology, all classrooms have group folders for group learning, multimedia classrooms for solo learning, sports fields, fully equipped laboratories, cafeteria and food concessionaire. It has a separate initial area where classrooms are specially designed to meet the demands of the Early Childhood methodology.