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.

So, how did Akintunde Opawole (AO) find himself in the field of product management?

AO: This might sound like a cliché but I would say that I’ve been doing products without knowing I was doing product management. Over 10years ago, I worked on a product with a startup called V-campus solutions. Where I helped the startup to build a CBT application and then worked on some product videos at the time. I was the product lead on that project, and that was how my journey into product management began. At the time, I didn’t know that this was me setting a path for myself for a career in product management. When I got into Sidmach technologies, I was really interested in our products even though I was in marketing at that time.

I was heavily invested in specific products which I was championing, and that was how I got to develop a huge interest in product management. Over time after so many years and a series of training in brand management, and all that, I got to see that product management was the path for me and that was how I went full-time into it when there was an opportunity in Sidmach at that time.

ALSO READ: Why Zoho CRM is an Essential Tool For Businesses Aiming for Success- Ogundare

There was a product where we partnered with a company in the UK to launch into the Nigerian market. I was asked if I would like to lead the product at that time and I jumped right on it. That moment was how my product management journey started officially.

What is a typical day in the life of a product manager like?

AO: It depends on the organization, the role, size of the team, just to mention a few. Although, in between all of these variations, we still have some bit of similar typical day in life.

Well- depending on the day of the week, I start with-

• Planning and Documenting

First is, keeping tab on the Product Vision, developing and updating my Sprint/Kanban board to make sure it reflects my current priorities and progress and ensure we are well aligned with the vision of the product.

Then update my Product Roadmap to ensure product timeline is on track and all stakeholders are well updated by communicating through different channels such as product councils, end of the week updates on Slack channels, Sprint reviews amongst others. Also, refining the product backlog in preparation for sprint planning, and setting the sprint goal.

• Meetings and Communication

As a product manager, 70% of the time you will find us having series of meetings with different stakeholders at different point in time, ranging from meetings with your Development team, Product Team, Support, QA, Marketing and Sales amongst others. briefing and debriefing stakeholders.

• Researching & Analyzing

As a PM, we don’t stop learning. Consistent research and learning of customer behaviour, track metrics and key performance indicators, find bugs, gather user stories and customer feedback, collect data from the market, talk to your stakeholders and see what you can do to improve things.

You know, it’s usually a rollercoaster but as a product manager how I would sum up a day in life is being a nexus between stakeholders, working with the engineering team, ideating and thinking strategically on the product, and of course, balancing chaos.

What do you enjoy most about your profession?

AO: It’s the fact that I am working on something, ideating on something, or improving on something that can change lives, the way people work and the way people do things. That joy is limitless.

The fact that you can see your product in the market, somebody is using it and then you’re like Wow! Getting to hear from your users on how the product has helped them and played a significant role in their activities, is something that really gives me joy.

There is nothing more beautiful than you ideating something, bringing it to life, seeing what you thought about, seeing features that you thought about, and then you see it come alive.

Not just come alive and then see people use it and give you feedback (good and bad). Such things give me immense joy.

For me, it’s also seeing the wow factor anytime I am demoing a product. There is this particular amazing feature, and when I share it with everyone and they are like ‘Wow, the product’ can do this?

That wow factor releases lots of dopamine in my head (chuckles) and it gives me joy. That is something I love the most about my profession.

Did you come to Sidmach Technologies with a computer science background?

AO: I didn’t come to Sidmach technologies with a computer science background. I didn’t even study computer science as a matter of fact.

I studied microbiology but I knew even while I was in university that I wasn’t going to practice microbiology. I had started developing websites at that time using Joomla, Drupal, HTML, and CSS back in the day so that was my background that got me into Sidmach. It was because I could build something.

What is Akintunde Opawole ‘s favorite memory as a product manager?

AO: My favorite memory as a product manager would be when we had planned to build a data analytics product. We were to build the MVP in 14 weeks. We showed the prototype to the client, and the client loved the prototype so much that the client said that the product needed to be ready in 3 weeks. This is a B2B product.

The client insisted that they’d love to launch the product in 3 weeks and it was a final call. There was nothing we could do about it and I tried as much as possible to see how we could make that happen.

It’s my favorite memory because it was like impossible. 14 weeks for MVP, and then pinning that down to 3 weeks was a huge task for me. Again, because my team and I got to bond together for 3 weeks in the same location working day and night to make that happen. That is one of my favorite memory as a product manager because it brought us all together to see a goal that we all bought into and then make it happen.

What was your favorite project so far?

AO: I would say there are two products that are my favorite so far:

One is a workflow management product. I love that product because it involved us solving a need internally for the company. Then building it, tailoring it to the needs of the company, and then seeing it in use. It’s mind-blowing!

The second is a data product. Building a product with 150 million rows of datasets and then bringing it to life. Those two are my favorite so far. That’s Approval flow and Edustat.

Has Akintunde Opawole witnessed any moment as a product manager which he wished never happened?

AO: The sun-setting of a product that had so much potential and I was really passionate about due to dissolution of contract with a critical partner.

We have seen Product Managers (PM) being described as the CEO of a product…what are the qualities a PM must have??

AO: In no particular order of hierarchy, they are

• Excellent communication Skills
• Leadership abilities
• Strategic thinker
• Empathy
• Time-Management
• Passionate
• Ability to Analyze and Prioritize

How viable is the field of PM today?

AO: The field of Product Management is really viable as their many jobs in demand today. Product Managers are also relatively well paid and are very important stakeholders in any organization.

Thank you Akintunde Opawole for this opportunity to learn from you.

AO: It is my pleasure.​