Education can serve as a technological tool for the achievement of socioeconomic and technological goals and the growth of a nation. A country’s development lies solely in its educational system. Hence, if the standard of education is high, it can lead to improved changes in a nation’s economy, and if it is low, it can grossly affect the quality of the output of a nation’s economy as well.
Considering that the process of receiving a quality education isn’t dependent on the size of a classroom, benches, and students sitting to listen alone, but on how much planning and preparation has gone into making sure that the student and pupils enjoy the process of being schooled and the teachers effectively deliver their bit in a system that is easy and encouraging to work in, processes for running an academic institution must embrace basic tools/ requirements that are available to drive productivity and effective dissemination of services.
These plans and processes are what is referred to as “administrative management” in schools. Administrative management is the systematic application of both human and material resources to realize an organization’s goals. It also refers to the processes that are in place to ensure the efficient execution of daily tasks.
Research has shown that one of the major hindrances to rapid growth and advancement in the educational sector in Nigeria is poor administrative management. These hindrances led to the development of Tespire, a startup committed to equipping schools with systems that ease administrative processes in offices and classrooms by improving the delivery of duties that, in turn, improve educational results that impact students, teachers, and the nation at large.
PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH POOR ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGEMENT.
Some administrative problems that Tespire discovered and aims to solve are:
Difficulty in managing school administrative activities- The average school in Nigeria still deals with issues of using paper to record data, transmit results etc. This method of delivery is not only prone to mistakes, but it is also tasking and wastes lots of time.
Undue stress by students to process admission, accommodation, fee payments, etc. With the level of advancement in technology, students are meant to experience ease in running certain things, but we find out that in most schools in Nigeria today, students still have to join long queues to process their accommodations or spend exhausting hours in the bank to pay their fees. They even struggle to see their results after exams because results are still pasted on notice boards instead of on online portals for easy access. This does not just make schooling tedious; it makes it frustrating and discouraging as well.
Manual compilation of results leads to loss of exam scripts, missing grades, and incorrect computation due to exhaustion from teachers and unavoidable human error.
Leakage in revenue collection: Human error while manually creating invoices, and sending and receiving payments leads to leakage in school revenues, which leads to constant loss and regression for the school.
WHY WE BUILT TESPIRE.
Tespire was built with a desire to ease the difficulties associated with managing school administrative activities in Nigeria.
It is a solution that aims to reduce the use of paper and hard copy files for keeping students’ records in school, enable students to apply for admission from the comfort of their homes rather than dealing with long, frustrating queues, effectively manage student information and have an updated database of students, facilitate automated online assignment submission/ report generation, integrate systems of payment for easy receipt of fees paid from different channels by parents and individuals, and enable mailing of results to parents and students after each test/exams.
We do this through varying products, such as:
Tespire Basic- a cloud-based suite that optimizes school revenue collection and saves time during admissions, applications, and classroom management by reducing the amount of paperwork and enhancing the administrative processes in schools.
Tespire Admission- a panel that allows schools in urban and semi-urban Africa to receive applications remotely. The panel does auto-sorting to ease the process by filtering the qualified and unqualified candidates and notifying parents and candidates of successful or unsuccessful admission. Most importantly, this was built with the understanding of how schools in low internet coverage areas would like to work offline.
Revenue Collection- Tespire helps schools to close the gap of revenue leakages by simplifying the process of fee collections with a digital school wallet ID that serves as a NUBAN account number. Through this, parents and individuals are enabled to pay fees online or visit a bank branch. Tespire also auto-notifies parents of outstanding payments at intervals and presents a single dashboard for school administrators to monitor in real-time the flow of all transactions carried out daily.
Tespire Rez- Tespire Rez is a highly secured platform that allows schools to handle result processes, from the collection of scores per course/subject to the publishing of computed results, with ease.
Tespire Accommodation- This allows you to move away from manual room allocations, and the hostel admins get to be in full control of every aspect involved in managing students in dorms. It was built to harness the dynamism that exists in school dormitories. They can monitor payments received and allocation situations in real time from the accommodation dashboard.
Tespire aims to bring a lasting solution to most if not all, administrative issues in Nigeria’s education system, which is already long overdue. We believe that automation and ease are a way forward to getting sustainable and advanced results in our education system. If we can maximize the solutions that the Tespire product has introduced, we will begin to notice rapid growth and advancement in our education sector because teachers would begin to deliver at their best. Students would have time to focus on more productive ventures.
