Bridge International Academies
| For-profit private company | |
| Genre | Affordable schooling in the developing world |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Founder | Dr Shannon May, Jay Kimmelman, Phil Frei |
| Headquarters | Nairobi, Kenya |
|
Area served
|
India, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda |
| Website | http://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/ |
Bridge International Academies is a network of affordable schools which began in Kenya in 2008. It partners with governments, communities, teachers and families to deliver great schools and high quality affordable education to underserved families and children.
It uses a technology enabled approach to provide nursery and primary education through a centralised model, allowing it to scale quickly whilst keeping costs low. Further, its aim is to move towards global education reform one child at a time.
Bridge has over 500 schools and educates over 100,000 children. It is aiming to educate 10,000,000 pupils across 12 or more countries by 2025. It currently operates schools in India, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and Uganda.
It is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya with additional offices in Kampala, Lagos, Monrovia, Vijayawada, London, Boston, and Washington, DC.
Through the use of technology it streamlines school administration, delivers lessons plan to teachers, facilitates classroom management and track the progress of both teachers and students in real time.
The company has notable investor support from Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
Bridge schools are different from many competitor schools in that they prohibit their teachers from using corporal punishment.
Bridge International Academies was founded by friends Shannon May, Jay Kimmelman and Phil Frei, who met at Harvard University to solve for some of the most intractable problems in education and development, including: underprepared teachers, rampant teacher absenteeism, ill-equipped classrooms, and fraudulent administrative practices.
The challenge was to find a way to offer a high-quality education free from these problems at a cost lower than most other private academies. The key was devising a business model based on scalability, and designing an innovative, technology-driven teaching method and system of administrative management.
Bridge’s headquarters opened in Nairobi, Kenya in 2008. The first academy launched in 2009 in Makuru kwa Njenga, an east-Nairobi slum that is home to over 100,000 people. From 2009 to 2015, Bridge expanded across Kenya, bringing its innovative approach to education to thousands more children every year.
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