This Company “FlexiSAF” Wants Nigerian Schools To Stop Using Paper For Everything

It’s about time to be honest. I’m sure many of us can remember carrying paper report sheets home. And losing your report booklets was one of the worst sins ever, because it actually meant losing all of your academic records. So automating that process? Yes please.

There is no correct record detailing the number of educational institutions in Nigeria, but as at 2009, estimates showed that there were over 60,000 of them, private and public. The present day number should be closer to 80,000 and 90% still carry out their operations manually on paper.

When you’re getting ready to tell your teacher you cannot find your report booklet:

It is this process, and many more school processes that FlexiSAF wants to automate and make more efficient. FlexiSAF, is a software development company, built by Faiz Bashir, Alameen Ibrahim and Abubakar Manga, providing school management and result compilation software, among other solutions, to Nigerian educational institutions.

The company launched in 2007 and has grown its customer base to 15 tertiary institutions and over 400 secondary schools across Nigeria. The company has processed over 53,000 school transcripts and over 800,000 results and it houses more than 100,000 student records, mitigating the risk of lost records. FlexiSAF is based in Abuja, but it has branches in Lagos and four other Nigerian cities and employs 57 people.

Many educational technology solutions are emerging, but the Nigerian educational sector is very slow to adopt these automated processes. The technology to reach them is available, many schools can now afford a computer, so there is no reason why schools shouldn’t automate their processes. But yet they refuse to.

Early last year, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (AWRU) and the Center for World Universities Ranking (CWUR) released a list of the top 500 and 1000 world universities respectively and no Nigerian university made the list. Later on , Times Higher Education went on to acknowledge only one Nigerian university in its report released later that year, with a ranking of 801.

One would think this would motivate Nigerian institutions to do what they can to boost not just the quality of education (which leaves plenty to be desired), but also the educational processes, but one would be very wrong.