And yet, even as they watched the world’s largest rocket burst into a fireball, SpaceX engineers still roared with cheers and applause.

The launch was hailed as “a real accomplishment” and “so successful”.

Why?

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary,” SpaceX later tweeted.

SpaceX said before the mission that “any data it yielded would be valuable as long as the rocket cleared the launch pad” — which it did.

This is where the lessons come from – SpaceX engineers went for the ‘data’, not necessarily for the Starship Rocket to hit the moon and/or Mars on the first launch. Now they have the data, expect them to be more accurate in the next launch!

The Need for accurate data:

Data helps a company redefine its strategy, increase their revenue and profits by making the company more efficient, providing key insights into operations and customer satisfaction and helping to improve certain processes. 

​​Data can help businesses measure whether certain actions, products or services are profitable and where their greatest expenses might be. Identifying expenses is often the key to increasing profits because businesses can reduce those expenses and keep more of the revenue they earn. Raw data helps the company identify where it can trim expenses, increase efforts and earn more revenue. 

Again, that is why stakeholders in the education sector in Nigeria were full of praise for the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and its technology partners, Sidmach Technologies, following the development of Edustat platform.

I tell you why: Data plays a critical role in problem-solving for company leaders. With an abundance of data, company leaders can identify and address key problems and monitor the effects of proposed solutions.

Solving problems can be much easier and solutions are more effective when the person solving that problem has sufficient information. Understanding the problem in its entirety is typically the first step toward solving that problem.

That is why the SpaceX team didn’t bury their heads in sand when the Spaceship Rocket ‘failed’. Are you in the EdTech space in Nigeria? Edustat presents you with a dataset to rave-up your products/services.

Edustat is a data and Artificial Intelligence-driven analytics platform that offers rich and unique smart statistical insights into education and assessment in West Africa using historical and current data to provide detailed intelligence for stakeholders across the globe in a smart and easily accessible manner. It offers a variety of rich, interactive educational assessment statistics, and insights, in graphs, summaries, tables, trends and interactive dashboards for intelligence, research, and informed decision-making in just a few clicks.

WAEC, in partnership with Sidmach, developed Edustat with ease of use in mind. So, it was built for users to easily sign up, and select the kind of report or intelligence they seek, with an array of filters to filter down the expected result by age, gender, demography, and even special needs amongst many other options of filters.

Values Edustat offers users

Everyone can benefit from Edustat, but let’s highlight a few: Researchers/academics (PhD students, professorship, masters) – We all know it is usually difficult to access accurate data that cover education statistics in gender, disabilities, regions, male/female and other indexes. Researchers will have cause to smile because Edustat contains more than just statistical numbers; you are assured of infographics.

The team infused a summary of any insight or report you generate using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.

The opportunities are numerous. Governments at all levels – Federal, State, LGA; MDAs, are welcome to use Edustat.

For instance, the Ogun State Government wants to assess the state’s performance in SSCE over the years. They can compare their State with other States for developmental planning, and interventions (in case the students are not doing well in certain subjects like English, Mathematics, etc).

A State Government that pays WAEC fees its students would cherish having accurate data on their performances.

Funding Agencies – The World Bank, UNESCO, DFID, etc., who are looking for reliable data for interventions for scholarships, erect classrooms/ this will help for informed decisions.

Schools are not left out. Schools would want to know how they perform in WAEC; maybe for the bragging rights of 9As or other achievements. This will help them compare with other schools. They can track how their female students are performing; how the students (generally) are doing per subject; juxtapose their performance to others.

The team really worked hard to integrate AI Predictive Modelling, so schools shall be able to predict how students will perform in future high school assessments – known as WAEC school exams.

Also, Parents who moved to new locations do not know which School to pick for their kids. Worry not; you can assess schools’ performance in WAEC through Edustat.

Private Corporate/Individuals – Any company that does anything on Education like Edcent, uLesson, Edusko, will help them build, and scale up their products, contents, or solutions around subjects.

They can ascertain how candidates perform in each subject in real time.

It is a web-based application for now, but it can be assessed from any device, Laptop, Phone, Tablet etc. It is adaptive to any device and provides everyone with the same experience across all devices.

Edustat offers Pay Per Report. What that means is that you only need to pay for the insight/report you are seeking per time.

But again, with the ease of use in mind, the team built the product with a wallet system which allows users to fund their wallets with sufficient funds which allows them to pay for the statistics/reports/insights they seek by drawing funds from their funded wallet automatically.

So, what are you waiting for, sign up on Edustat (https://waec.edustat.ng/) today!

Can you tell us how the journey to building the platform started?

From a Product development perspective, it started with understanding the clear vision of our partners, the potential users, their needs, and the market. This included lots of research and countless stakeholder meetings that gave birth to the product and the direction the product will go. The journey was a rollercoaster to be honest as we were excited to build something special by using data and artificial intelligence to solve problems in the educational sector.

At the same time, it was exhausting due to the amount of work we knew was to be done to bring this product to life. But I must mention that we were blessed with visionary partners, from the Head of National Office WAEC to the committee members, ICTD, Finance, Legal, and Public Relations amongst other critical stakeholders who made our job easier by supporting us at different levels and even at odd hours.

The journey was demanding as we built day and night all the required features, testing, taking feedback, and reiterating new features. There were lots of sleepless nights for sure, including team meetings in the middle of the night, demos, debugging and lots of learning but it was worth it.

As the product lead, how do you feel seeing the project coming live?  

For me, it’s still surreal. I still can’t believe the public acceptance and reaction it has gotten since the launch. Even though this is one of many products I have worked on that has gone live, Edustat feels different. And so, I am happy but more importantly excited by the potential of the product, and the problems it will solve in the market.

What are the solutions EDUSTAT offers stakeholders in the education value chain? Edustat offers

Edustat is a data and Artificial Intelligence-driven analytics platform that offers rich and unique smart statistical insights into education and assessment in West Africa using historical and current data to provide detailed intelligence for stakeholders across the globe in a smart and easily accessible manner. It offers a variety of rich, interactive educational assessment statistics, and insights, in graphs, summaries, tables, trends and interactive dashboards for intelligence, research, and informed decision-making in just a few clicks.

We developed Edustat with ease of use in mind, so it was built for our users to easily sign up, and select the kind of report or intelligence they seek, with an array of filters to filter down the expected result by age, gender, demography, and even special needs amongst many other options of filters.

Who would you say will be the biggest beneficiary of EDUSTAT? 

Everyone can benefit from Edustat, but I would like to highlight a few. Researchers/academics (PhD students, professorship, masters) – We all know It is usually difficult to access accurate data that cover education statistics in gender, disabilities, regions, male/female and other indexes. Researchers will have cause to smile because Edustat contains more than just statistical numbers; you are assured of infographics. We infused a summary of any insight or report you to generate using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.

The opportunities are numerous. Governments at all levels – Federal, State, LGA; MDAs, are welcome to use Edustat.

For instance, Kebbi State Government wants to assess the state’s performance in SSCE over the years. They can compare their State with other States for developmental planning, and interventions (in case the students are not doing well in certain subjects like English, Mathematics, etc). A State Government that pays WAEC fees its students would cherish having accurate data on their performances.

Funding Agencies – The World Bank, UNESCO, DFID, etc., who are looking for reliable data for interventions for scholarships, erect classrooms/ this will help for informed decisions.

Schools are not left out. Schools would want to know how they perform in WAEC; maybe for the bragging rights of 9As or other achievements. This will help them compare with other schools. They can track how their female students are performing; how the students (generally) are doing per subject; juxtapose their performance to others.

We have worked hard to integrate AI Predictive Modelling, so schools shall be able to predict how students will perform in future high school assessments – known as WAEC school exams.

Also, Parents who moved to new locations do not know which School to pick for their kids. Worry not; you can assess schools’ performance in WAEC through Edustat.

Private Corporate/Individuals – Any company that does anything on Education like uLesson, Edusko, will help them build, and scale up their products, contents, or solutions around subjects. They can ascertain how candidates perform in each subject in real time.

How does it work? Is it a web or app-based application?

It is a web-based application for now, but it can be assessed from any device, Laptop, Phone, Tablet etc. It is adaptive to any device and provides everyone with the same experience across all devices.

Is it a subscription-based product? If yes, how is the payment process? 

It is a Pay Per report-based product. What that means is that you only need to pay for the insight/report you are seeking per time. But again, with the ease of use in mind, we built the product with a wallet system which allows our users to fund their wallets with sufficient funds which allows them to pay for the statistics/reports/insights they seek by drawing funds from their funded wallet automatically.

Would you say that EDUSTAT is the biggest project you have anchored as a project manager? 

Laughs… I would say it is one of the many biggest projects I have worked on.

What were the major challenges you encouraged during the process of developing EDUSTAT?  

Hmmm, Time was our major challenge and the number of features we had planned to develop in that amount of time. With Visionary partners and Leaders on a project, it is extremely demanding to build the best product and ship it out for public use in a stipulated time. That was my major challenge during the process of developing Edustat.

With over 40 million tested candidates in the last 71 years of its operations, WAEC in partnership with Sidmach Technologies, an ICT firm that develops and deploys software solutions at scale to solve high-impact business challenges, will this week launch a revolutionary education data platform codenamed EduStat.

Why EduStat?

As WAEC prepares to launch its revolutionary education statistics platform think about this scenario:

Olabisi Adebanjo (fictional name) is a final year student of XYZ University. She plans to conduct a review on students’ Senior Secondary Certificate Examinations (SSCE) performances in the last 10 years. Olabisi’s plan is to use Machine Learning to evaluate students’ performances in a particular school in Oyo State; from the results she can project how the school will perform in the next five SSCE sittings should things remain as they are, presently.

She also plans to make recommendations to students, parents, teachers, the school management, educational body (the government), and ultimately to commercialise her project building an EdTech startup upon passing out from her National Youth Service Corp.

Now, Olabisi is faced with one challenge – arranging the data set to achieve her goal. Where is the data?

This is where Edustat comes in. The platform offers educational analysis, using data visualization and data analysis tools as well as reliable educational assessment data to help users make informed decisions.

WAEC has been generating a lot of data over the years. Imagine 71 years of data backlogs in its vaults. And there are people who seek this data for academic purposes or government projects.

So, working with Sidmach, WAEC built the EduStat portal for real-time generation of educational statistics over the years. And you should be excited because as a user you can filter the data down to specifics!

Who needs EduStat?

Researchers/academics (PhD students, professorship, masters) – It is usually difficult to access accurate data that cover education statistics in gender, persons with disabilities, regions, male/female and other indexes. Researchers will have a cause to smile because EduStat contains more than just statistical numbers; you are assured of infographics. The developers infused a summary of the statistics using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.

Therein are Graphs Optimization Guides (GOG) for people who have not used electronics graphs before. This guide tells them what each part of the graph represents; you can pan on the graphics too. You can query the graphics according to dates, or times.

Interestingly, the numbers can be converted in tabular formats – standard deviation of what statistics you are looking for. You can also save your report for personalized use – it can be downloaded as PDF and the graphs can be saved as Image to be used in presentations.

The opportunities are numerous. Governments at all levels – Federal, State, LGA; MDAs, are welcome to use EduStat.

For instance, Kebbi State Government wants to assess the state’s performances in SSCE over the years. They can compare their State with other States for developmental planning, interventions (in case the students are not doing well in certain subjects like English, Mathematics, etc).

A State Government that pays WAEC fees their students would cherish to have the accurate data of their performances. This data is unique to WAEC! You can’t find it at the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). In fact, NBS relies on WAEC to provide them with certain data.

The usage is anonymous-based data. Unlike some institutions that share personal data; the WAEC EduStat is GDPR and NDPR compliant.

Thus, Funding Agencies – The World Bank, UNESCO, DFID, etc., who are looking for reliable data for interventions for scholarships, erect classrooms/ this will help for informed decisions.

Schools are not left out. Schools would want to know how they perform in WAEC; maybe for the bragging rights of 9As or other achievements. This will help them compare with other schools. They can track how their female students are performing; how the students (generally) are doing per subject; juxtapose their performance to others.

So, with AI Predictive Modelling, schools shall be able to predict how students will perform in WAEC.

Parents who moved to new locations, but do not know which School to pick for their kids. Worry not; you can assess schools’ performance in WAEC through EduStat.

Private Corporate/Individuals – Any company that does anything on Education like uLessons, Edusko, – this will help them to build, scale-up their products, contents, or solutions around particular subjects. They can ascertain how candidates are performing, for each subject, in real-time.

You feel like signing up on EduStat, right? Great! WAEC will launch the product this week and you will get to know how to subscribe and even the Wallet system that follows.

Often, education data is used to measure the success of a State, Region, Institutions or Individuals and benchmark them against others to improve your own work, products, or processes.

Nowadays, most States publish annual report ‘detailing’ education data meant to hold schools accountable, but why are the students’ success rates at examinations not improving?

It simply means there’s a problem. The information presented in most of these annual reports or scorecards are not always reliable. And the fault lies in the way the data is sourced, compiled and presented.

What exactly goes wrong? How does data become inaccurate? And where can students, parents, schools, researchers, businesses and the government get accurate data about schools’ performances with regards to learning and examinations in Nigeria?

Missing Data

I can boldly say that the ‘missing data’ is at the ‘vault’ of the 71-year-old West African Examinations Council (WAEC) established in 1952 to be a world-class examining body, adding value to the educational goals of its stakeholders. How?

Yes, many reports churn out of researches or academic exercises lack sufficient and accurate data. In many cases, data was not available on demographics like gender, ethnicity, income level, or disabilities. On top of that, most reports can point to the exact key performance indicators.

Takeaway > Many challenges in the educational sector will remain unsolved without access to accurate data. Data!

Let’s break it down: Increase in infrastructural decay, limited resources including personnel, and/or adequate funding in the education sector are traceable to lack of accurate, adequate and real-time access to data for planning and decision-making.

The UN recently released a damning report that only 15 percent of Nigerians have access to electricity, while UNESCO states that only 24 percent receive secondary education or higher.

What statistics like these throw to our faces are the reasons an overwhelming number of Nigerian children lack access a basic education, even in a 21st Century world.

Therefore, a data-driven approach can help address problems such as the lack of infrastructure by using local statistics to identify areas where progress can be made.

For corporate organisations, sometimes it takes just one individual to come up with an innovative new approach that gives your organisation the competitive edge, but more often than not, it requires the collaboration of various different teams and the combination of lots of different data sources.

In today’s fast-paced and artificial intelligence (AI) driven world, most executives agree data-driven operations across lines of business is key to a winning strategy.

Illustrating that point is the 85% increased investment in digital capabilities and 77% increased investment in IT, as reported in the 2022 Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey. Giving your employees the ability to access and make sense of their data, whether they sit within technical teams or not, is therefore crucial to your success.

Your data needs to be democratised across the business, although this is often harder than it would seem.

According to New Vantage Partners’ Data and AI Leadership Executive Survey 2022, only 27% of organisations have managed to nail this, with another 19% struggling to establish a data culture.

Through 2025, 80% of organisations seeking to scale digital business will fail because they don’t take a modern approach to data and analytics governance, as stated by Gartner’s State of Data and Analytics Governance.

Unfortunately, modernising tech stacks and migrating to the cloud are not enough to put the right data in the right hands of everyone across the business. Organisations must modernise their governance practices to fully uphold their efforts.

For instance, if an Educational Technology (EdTech) startup can find out why there aren’t enough schools in a certain area, they can use census data to determine how many students live there.

Upon completion of that phase, they move further to collaborate with government officials to work out what must be done — maybe constructing more schools or finding ways to transport students who currently walk long distances to school each day.

How about researchers? It is a no-brainer that ‘poor quality data can have serious effects on later analysis. Data containing errors of commission or omission have the potential of throwing off analytical calculations, which may then lead to incorrect conclusions’.

Real-Time Access to Data is the Solution

The best way to describe this is to see education data as an apparatus that receives and uses inputs to help run the educational process, producing outputs that tangible and/or measurable. Data use deepens critical thinking and decision-making by parents, teachers, students, educational institutions, researchers, donor agencies/NGOs, businesses and the government.

Thus, collecting and analyzing data to determine why children are out of school will allow you to take actionable steps to reduce these numbers. For example, if you find that many young girls drop out after their first menstruation cycle (usually around age 12 or 13), you can focus resources on providing private sanitation facilities for girls at their schools.

This will help eliminate hygiene-related reasons for young girls dropping out of school and ensure they stay engaged with education.

By collecting data about why children aren’t enrolled in school, it is possible to make informed decisions about how best to address your target population’s needs.

You can also use data to measure how effective interventions have been in reducing dropout rates. This information can be used by decision-makers to create programs tailored specifically for your region and local culture.

In addition to focusing on specific groups based on location and demographics, you can collect data from each student who has dropped out of school.

So, innovative solutions informed by high-quality data and evidence can help improve school performance and keep children in school, especially those who are most at risk of dropping out.

Currently, 1 in 6 Nigerian students is not enrolled or attends irregularly, but with proper attention to data, concerned stakeholder can make sure that not one more Nigerian child has to grow up without an education. This will require political will, effective planning, and coordination between federal and state government officials as well as local communities.

Well, there is light at the end of the tunnel, as the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), is taking the bull by the horn through the introduction of an artificial intelligence-driven Education Statistics (EduStat) platform.

Find out about more about the potentials of EduStat here.