A IS FOR ABUSE: Two Harvard Grads Saw Big Profits in African Education. Children Paid the Price. (The Intercept)

[mastermind]

I am watching This Is Revolution, and they interviewed Ryan Grim and Neha Wadecker talk about this disgusting farce of a school. Its basically a charter school that goes wild:

Two Harvard Grads Saw Big Profits in African Education. Children Paid the Price.

An aggressive startup with World Bank funding set out to to disrupt African education. Now it’s plagued by a sexual abuse investigation.

theintercept.com

IN THE EARLY days of the era of Silicon Valley disruption, two Harvard University graduates dreamed up a bold experiment in education.

Shannon May, who studied education development in rural China, and her husband, Jay Kimmelman, an education software developer, spied an untapped opportunity for some of the moving-fast-and-breaking-things going on all around them.

“In 2007, we came to Africa,” May explained in a promotional video for the company they would go on to found: Bridge International Academies. “Due diligence had shown us that there were an incredibly high number of enrolled children who were still illiterate upon graduation — and was there a possible business model that could solve this? Was there something that could be done, even though people said there wasn’t anything that could be done?”

The couple did the math and found that parents of impoverished children around the globe were spending many billions a year on schooling. Kimmelman invited his former roommate, Phil Frei, a tech consultant, to join as a co-founder. “We all moved to Nairobi in 2008, and within six months, we had the first school up and running,” May said.

Over the next decade, Bridge grew into a chain of schools providing a homogeneous curriculum developed by researchers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to hundreds of thousands of students in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Liberia, and India. Today, it is the largest for-profit primary education chain in the world.

As the company mushroomed, it found ready investors. “It was not social impact investors,” May said in a 2016 MIT video case study, “it was straight commercial capital who saw, like, wow, there are a couple billion people who don’t have anyone selling them what they want.”

But the social impact investment crew was behind Bridge, as well. The company is financed today by some of the highest-profile do-good donors in the game — or rather, the for-profit arms of their networks, including Chan Zuckerberg Education, LLC, linked to Mark Zuckerberg; Pearson Education; Gates Frontier LLC, tied to Bill Gates; Imaginable Futures, linked to eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, a major funder of The Intercept; and Pershing Square Foundation, tied to billionaire hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman. The United Kingdom’s development bank, the European Investment Bank, and the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank funded it too.

TO BECOME PROFITABLE, May and Kimmelman had to scale up quickly while keeping costs down. “Bridge International Academies was founded from day one on the premise of this massive market opportunity, knowing that to achieve success, we would need to achieve a scale never before seen in education, and at a speed that makes most people dizzy,” an early version of the company’s website boasted. To do well with small margins, thousands of classrooms would be needed, because each classroom could bring in a profit of just tens of dollars a month. “The urgency is because the only way you can have a price of $5 a month is if you have hundreds of thousands of customers. We need 500,000 pupils to break even,” May said in 2013.

Their idea of how to accomplish such scale was straightforward: The largest cost when it comes to education is teacher salaries. But if curricula can be centrally produced and distributed on tablets that teachers read to the class, word for word, then teacher pay can plummet.

That, May believed, would not hurt the quality of education children received. While the school reform movement in the United States at the time was fighting against what it called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — easier curricula for minority students that reflected racist assumptions about their learning capacity — May argued that in Africa, high expectations are bigoted. “‘Don’t you have to have brilliant teachers in every room in order to have a well-educated child?’ ’Cause honestly, that’s how a wealthy person would think of it,” May explained. “You can’t have a brilliant-teacher hypothesis and expect to change the education for hundreds of millions of children.”

It was also appropriate to pay those teachers less, she argued. “You have to be able to upscale the teachers that would be available within the same community as your child. How are you going to get tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands, of teachers to be working with hundreds of millions of impoverished children? They need to be from the same community. They need to face similar challenges. But also economically, they need to be part of the same economy.” Hiring teachers who are “part of the same economy” meant paying them just a few dollars a day.

Bridge ran into difficulties staffing up quickly. “The operations still have lots of tweaks they need, but they’re working well enough that it makes sense to now blow the business out a little more,” May said at the time. She admitted it was “much more hard to hire” good teachers who could grow as quickly as the business, yet Bridge plowed ahead with its breakneck expansion, hiring less qualified teachers at significantly less cost than rival public schools.

In 2022, Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Kremer conducted a study in Kenya to assess the efficacy of standardized learning at Bridge schools. The resulting report, which Bridge heavily promotes, found that public school teachers in Kenya were paid between $235 to $392 per month plus generous benefits, while Bridge teachers worked longer hours but earned around $80 per month with considerably fewer benefits than their public school counterparts.

“By not requiring post-secondary credentials, which typically represent a smaller share of the labor force in lower-middle income countries, Bridge has been able to draw from a larger pool of secondary school graduates,” the study read.

Bridge told The Intercept that all the teachers it hires meet the changing requirements stipulated by the Kenyan government. According to Bridge’s 2017 administrative data, only 23 percent of its primary school teachers held recognized primary education certificates.

Bridge also whacked away at the second highest education costs: facilities. According to Kremer’s study, while public schools in Kenya were required to have stone, brick, or concrete walls, Bridge designed standardized schoolhouses largely out of wooden framing and mesh wire, enclosed by iron sheeting — derisively dubbed “chicken coops for kids.” “Bridge’s founders recognize that the model deprioritizes physical infrastructure and they have argued that this frees up resources for expenditure on other inputs that can improve school quality,” the Kremer study noted. “Bridge schools are not made of ‘mesh wire’; they have windows with mesh wire,” a Bridge spokesperson said.

“Our biggest challenge is that we need to ensure we standardize everything,” Kimmelman was quoted as saying in “Bridge International Academies: School in a Box,” a 2010 Harvard Business School case study. “If we want to be able to operate like McDonald’s we need to make sure that we systematize every process, every tool, everything we do.” They later revised it for branding purposes to “academy in a box,” May said, “when we realized everyone here calls a private school that’s good an academy.”

Investors were familiar with the model: The company would understandably lose money in the early years, but as long as growth was steady, profitability could ultimately be reached. And, with enough scale, it might eventually loosen regulatory obstacles in the same way that ride-hailing app companies become too big for a city or state to do anything but accept them and adapt.

And Bridge saw explosive growth, opening hundreds of schools across Kenya and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as India, sometimes without obtaining the bureaucratic approvals and permits required to do so legally.

“Technically, we’re breaking the law,” May said in a 2013 article in the education publication Tes — a quote that was reused in a mostly favorable 2017 New York Times profile of Bridge. “There would be more people and more organizations willing to try and push the envelope and get higher pupil outcomes if the regulatory and legal framework was less restrictive,” May went on. “You have to be extreme. You have to take real risks to work in those environments. Often there are [laws] preventing most companies from trying to figure out how to solve these problems.”

 

[mastermind]

Then, in March 2022, the World Bank’s financing arm — the International Finance Corporation — quietly divested from NewGlobe, the parent company of Bridge International. No announcement was made. No reason was given. Just a short disclosure in small print at the bottom of a portal that reads, “Update: IFC has exited its investment in NewGlobe Schools, Inc.”

Among locals and within the global network of civil society organizations that work on development projects, rumors swirled that the dark side of Bridge’s success may have played a role — specifically, a series of abuse and neglect allegations in Kenya that had caught the eye of a Nairobi-based human rights group, the East African Centre for Human Rights, or EACHRights, as well as the internal watchdog at the World Bank, known as the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, or CAO.

“I think you are referring to unsubstantiated allegations lodged several years ago,” Bridge spokesperson Philip Emase told The Intercept in February when we first inquired about the allegation of “abuse and neglect” the World Bank watchdog was probing. Emase pointed out that the CAO was duty-bound to assess all allegations pertaining to their investments, but suggested that these complaints lodged by EACHRights, “an organization with a longstanding opposition to the education provision Bridge Kenya provides,” stemmed from a vendetta against Bridge, rather than factual evidence. “EachRIGHTS [sic] has campaigned against Bridge Kenya for many years. Bridge Kenya has been fully cooperative with the ongoing CAO process over the years,” he said.

It’s true that EACHRights has campaigned against Bridge, but behind some of the allegations lodged with CAO was a haunting story of abuse.

DURING LUNCH BREAK on a school day in the spring of 2016, David Nanzai, an eighth-grade teacher at Bridge Kwa Reuben, a school in the Mukuru informal settlements in Nairobi, found an anonymous handwritten note between the pages of a Kiswahili textbook sitting on his desk.

The note, which Nanzai surmised had been left by a girl in the upper grades, described sexual abuse by another teacher. The man had touched her, the letter said, taken her hand and put it on his private parts, and asked her for oral sex and intercourse. Nanzai shared what he learned with a colleague, Andrew Omondi, and the two set out to investigate. They would soon discover that the student had been one of many.

Nanzai met privately with each of the female students in grades six through eight, and Omondi encouraged him to record the conversations so they’d have evidence. “I had developed my own rapport with the kids. They looked at me as a father figure,” Nanzai said.

Eventually, they figured out who had written the note, and as they investigated further, they found at least 11 girls, aged 10 to 14, had been assaulted. They suspected three other girls may have been too frightened to come forward.

Reporting by The Intercept — including interviews with parents, former Bridge teachers and staff, nonprofit workers, community leaders, education activists, and police officers — corroborated the scope and many of the details of the sexual abuse. Many of the sources asked for confidentiality, expressing fear of reprisal from Bridge and concern about a culture of secrecy.

The students’ stories were eerily similar, as relayed by parents and teachers to The Intercept. The accused teacher would instruct them to come to school as early as 6 a.m. for extra prep. He would call them into an office one by one and close the door. His alleged crimes ranged from unwanted touching to rape without a condom.

...

After the meeting, the teachers expected Ouko, the academy manager, to notify Bridge and call the police. But Ouko told them to leave her office so she could speak to the teacher alone, the four teachers said. The next thing they knew, the man had disappeared into the maze of crowded dirt streets that make up the Mukuru informal settlements. He was gone.

...

The abuse could have been caught sooner. Sometime in 2015, a year before the serial assault came to light, two class eight girls had attempted to get help from another teacher, Jackline Anudo. The girls had approached her, she told The Intercept, alleging that the same teacher was sexually assaulting them. Anudo tried to speak with the accused teacher but said he initially denied any wrongdoing. Several days later, Anudo said three class six girls approached her with the same story. Anudo said she spoke with the teacher again, and this time, he admitted the assault, “so it forced me to go to the academy manager.” When Anudo raised the issue with Ouko, she said Ouko warned her not to tell the parents and refused to investigate the allegations.

“I kept quiet,” Anudo said. “I feel very, very bad because when we are there, we, as the teacher — I wanted to make the pupils’ future better, to better their future.”

“These girls, some of them were in class six, and they were very tender at that time,” she added. She said she was subsequently warned by another teacher that she should not talk further to reporters from The Intercept, as the reporters might have her arrested.

In the months following the incident, Ndinga and several Bridge teachers attempted to find the man in the depths of Nairobi’s informal settlements. Several times, they got word from their contacts that he was in a certain location, but by the time they arrived, he had disappeared.

Told that The Intercept had identified the alleged perpetrator by name, a Bridge spokesperson acknowledged the abuse had taken place and confirmed the former teacher’s identity. Asked why the company had previously dismissed our inquiry, the spokesperson said that the company thought we were referring to different allegations.

And, in a letter from Bridge’s attorneys, the company added the threat of a lawsuit against The Intercept, citing the “potential for legal action” if the story was published. “The rare and isolated misconduct of a few bad apples should not tarnish the incredible work that these educators are doing in their communities every day,” read a letter from Andrew Philips, an attorney with Clare Locke LLP, positing that the problem was simply endemic in Kenya. It was, he wrote, “important to acknowledge the sad reality that sexual abuse of students by teachers has historically been a serious problem in Kenyan schools.”

The legal threat was a glimpse into the aggressive posture Bridge had become known for, a reputation that was forged in the global press amid its battle in Uganda with a Canadian graduate student named Curtis Riep.

 

[mastermind]

...

ON MAY 30, 2016, just weeks after the teachers and parents had reported the abusive teacher to the police in Nairobi, Curtis Riep sat down in a café in Kampala, Uganda. A Ph.D. candidate in educational policy studies at the University of Alberta, Riep was in the city compiling a report on Bridge schools for Education International, a global federation of teachers unions.

He had managed to schedule an interview with a Bridge national director and a regional manager. As the men began their conversation, Riep began recording, as he did for all such meetings, so that he could later transcribe the answers.

So Riep’s recorder was rolling when moments later, a plain-clothed police detective dressed in a suit — or, at least, a man identifying as one — and two self-proclaimed officers in militarized uniforms carrying assault-style weapons approached the table. Riep later transcribed the resulting exchange verbatim in his dissertation.

“I work with the police — the Uganda police,” the “detective” said to Riep after exchanging pleasantries with the executives. “I’m going to be taking you now.”

“Excuse me?”

“I need you on the case of trespassing.”

“Trespassing where?” Riep asked.

It would later emerge that Bridge officials in Uganda had accused Riep of gaining access to Bridge schools by impersonating a teacher.

“There’s a school where you went to,” the plain-clothed man claiming to be a police detective said, telling Riep he “must come with me now.”

“I’m sorry but could you explain why? Where did I trespass?”

“Bridge International schools,” the man said.

“Bridge International schools? I’m speaking with these gentlemen right now, they come from Bridge International schools,” Riep said, naively and momentarily believing the mix-up would quickly be resolved.

“Those ones I’m not concerned with,” the detective said, “but you, you need to come with us.”

Riep again suggested confirming with the Bridge men at the table that no crimes were being committed. “Maybe we can speak to these men as well because they are the directors of Bridge International,” Riep responded.

“We are moving to Kyengera police. The details you can know from there,” the man said.

Riep demurred, saying the detective had no right to take him. “I’m telling you. You trespassed at their school,” the detective repeated.

“I had permission to be there,” Riep insisted. “These are the directors of the schools, so maybe we could have a conversation here.”

The Bridge national director’s voice finally entered the recording. “I, umm, this has nothing to do with me. You have your issue here. As for me, I’m out of this,” the man said, who Riep referred to later in his dissertation under the name Mr. Snow but has elsewhere been identified as Bridge executive Andrew White, a U.K. expat and a top Bridge official in Uganda. White was also later part of the Bridge team that responded to the investigation into serial assault in Kenya.

“Did you make a complaint to them?” Riep asked. There was no answer from the national director. He asked again.

“I don’t know what you mean. This has nothing to do with me, personally. I don’t know what it is,” the Bridge national director said, sipping his coffee.

The detective suggested the Bridge director would come to the Kyengera station with them.

“Yes, no problem. We will follow you there,” he said.

“I feel very uneasy about this. I should make a call before I go anywhere,” Riep interjected. “Can I ride with you?” he asked the Bridge director. “Because I have a few questions.”

“You can go with them,” he said. “We’ll follow you guys.”

“This seems fishy.”

“Yeah well, we’ll follow you.”

Riep asked to be able to send a message first. “OK, I’m just going to send a quick email to my family in Canada so they know if anything happens,” Riep said.

“Let’s go now,” the detective said.

Riep asked to see his badge as he opened his laptop to send his family an email.

There was no response. He turned to the Bridge director as he typed. “So, my friend, what is going on here?”

“All I know is what I’m seeing in front of me. The police have come and they’re asking you to go and answer questions about the charges that have been raised against you.”

“And that’s all you know?”

“What I’m seeing is what I know.”

“So, you haven’t had any contact with the police?”

“Do I know these three people? No, I don’t know these people.”

“No, that’s not what I asked.”

“It’s my first time seeing them.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Riep tried a different version. “So, it was just a coincidence that we meet here and then just a few minutes after, the police are here too?”

“Can we go now?” the increasingly impatient detective asked.

“OK, just give me a moment to send this email.”

The Bridge director stood up. “I guess we’ll have to finish our conversation another time,” he said.

“I thought you were coming with us?”

“We’ll see,” he said.

Riep hit send, and the email to his fiancé went through. He reproduced it in his dissertation:

… being escorted by police for something related to my research, not sure what is happening. Think its an inside job. Dont freak out. everything will be fine. but just wanted to let u know. If you dont hear from me within 24 hrs than take action. BUT PLEASE I WILL BE FINE!! PROMISE!! LOVE U
None of the three men with guns would identify themselves, and Riep made one last bid to connect on a human level with the Bridge director. “Please, I don’t know if these are real police. I mean, I don’t want my life to be in jeopardy. So, if you feel like you really need to protect yourself and Bridge to this extent, I think it is a mistake. Let’s not make this more of an issue. You are the director of Bridge so obviously we can sort this out another way,” Riep pleaded. The director was silent.

“Can we get moving?” the detective asked.

“Sure, well it was nice to meet you and I think we will see each other again very soon,” Riep told the two Bridge executives, and then turned off his recorder.

He was escorted to an unmarked car, noting that the men bore a “striking resemblance” to the private security guards the Ugandan elite hire to protect their homes and businesses.

Inside the car was another man, who identified himself as an attorney for the government of Uganda, but whom Riep later told the press he learned was a lawyer working for Bridge. They passed the Kampala Central Police Station and kept driving for more than an hour and a half, arriving at a two-room, clapboard police station in Kyengera, home to a front office and a holding cell. Four media outlets waited outside, filming Riep’s arrival. Two Bridge officials held forth about the danger Riep represented to the community. Riep, in his dissertation, said that the station’s police were confused about why he was there, which raised further questions about who the men who had “arrested” Riep at the café were.

He was interrogated by the police for several hours and told that Bridge had taken out an advertisement in a major local paper a few days earlier, on May 24. The ad warned the public Riep was “wanted by the police,” underneath a photograph of his face.

Spoiler

 

[mastermind]

THE IFC’S COMPLIANCE ADVISOR OMBUDSMAN was created in 1999 amid pressure from the anti-globalization movement for accountability related to private sector projects financed by the World Bank Group. In 2014, the CAO produced a damning report linking IFC funding to the murder of Indigenous people in Honduras, a scandal that would captivate the globe after the murder of celebrated activist Berta Cáceres. Under the tenure of CAO head Osvaldo Gratacós, which began later in 2014, the ombudsman completed a litany of hard-hitting investigations, uncovering major scandals.

In February 2020, responding to EACHRights’ 2018 complaint, CAO staff and experts traveled to Nairobi, the ombudsman later reported. There, investigators found something worse than what had been alleged. “The investigation team spoke to community members who raised concerns regarding several instances of alleged child sexual abuse at Bridge schools by school teachers,” according to a preliminary report published almost three years after the initial complaint.

Around the same time, in 2020, African civil society groups brought their concerns to Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., one of the more outspoken congressional advocates of human rights in Africa and the Caribbean. Waters, as the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, wielded enormous influence over U.S. policy on the World Bank, which was looking for new capital from Congress. Waters conditioned the new capital on a series of demands, including the bank divesting from Bridge. Her letter cited EACHRights, which worked directly with some of the victims. The pressure from Waters led to the IFC’s eventual divestment from Bridge. (The IFC maintains an indirect $200,000 holding in Bridge as a limited partner in Learn Capital Fund, which itself is invested in Bridge.)

Meanwhile, the sheer length of time the CAO was spending on the investigation began to capture the attention of the global civil society community. But CAO’s head, Gratacós, was dedicated to pursuing it. Typically, CAO investigates allegations when a complaint is filed by a third party, but given the stigma surrounding sexual assault, such complaints are rarely filed. In September 2020, the investigative outfit announced the extraordinarily unusual step of effectively filing its own child sexual abuse complaint involving Bridge under Gratacós’s own name.

The decision to move ahead with the sexual assault investigation at Bridge ratcheted up the tension between the bank and the CAO. It was the last major decision Gratacós made at the bank. In October of that year, the World Bank announced that Janine Ferretti would be taking over as CAO head. Reached by phone, Gratacós, now listed as a realtor in Northern Virginia, said that he was unable to comment.

Ferretti’s appointment was alarming to many observers. Gratacós had been inspector general at the Export-Import Bank and had experience leading independent investigations of complex and sensitive publicly backed investments. Ferretti had a very different background; she came from the management side, and spent most of her career as an executive at the Inter-American Development Bank, where she set environmental and social policy — precisely the type of management official she’d now be tasked with investigating.

Three U.S. senators had even sent a last-minute open letter to David Malpass, the Trump pick to head the World Bank. Sens. Patrick Leahy, Chris c00ns, and Tom Udall all expressed “concern with the selection process” and urged Malpass “to ensure independence” in the appointment.

uman rights and advocacy group leaders worried that the move to part ways with the head of the watchdog was connected to the fight over accountability for the IFC and other mission-driven investors.

“I find it deeply suspect that CAO uncovers explosive child sexual abuse allegations in the course of a compliance investigation and shortly thereafter, the World Bank president unexpectedly terminates the head of the CAO,” said one well-placed civil society representative whose clients have complaints before the CAO, asking for anonymity for fear of reprisal against those clients.

“He appoints a management insider without experience in accountability or oversight to head the office, a decision that many of us in civil society questioned at the time,” the source said. “Meanwhile, three years after the child sexual abuse allegations came to light, the CAO has still not produced an investigation report.”

Then, Ferretti unleashed a storm of protest when she tried to bring in a new head of compliance, Emmanuel Boulet. Boulet currently oversees the grievance process at IFC, meaning that he is the point person when it comes to defending the bank in the face of CAO investigations. Ferretti proposed moving him to the other side of the table.

Outside organizations protested to the World Bank, with the heads of eight civil society groups — Inclusive Development International, Accountability Counsel, Center for International Environmental Law, Center for Financial Accountability, Arab Watch Coalition, Bank Information Center, Recourse, and the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice — sending a starkly worded letter to Ferretti in September of last year, a copy of which was obtained by The Intercept. It described “Mr. Boulet’s current role with IFC management, which is defensive of IFC’s positions and practices,” and which he had held for 15 years, as incompatible with a watchdog function.

“Our trust and confidence is now deeply shaken because we fear that the appointment of someone to the role of Head of Compliance who is so irredeemably conflicted will seriously erode CAO’s independence, impartiality and integrity.”

A different letter was sent to the World Bank’s chief ethics officer, urging the hiring be paused pending an investigation. “This is the third recent senior level appointment at CAO from the Director General’s former unit at [the Inter-American Development Bank],” that letter noted.

The appointment was ultimately blocked, and Boulet remains at the IFC. But civil society groups are increasingly encountering former management figures as they interact with the CAO. “The whole office is just stacked now with management people, people who’ve spent their careers defending financial institutions against allegations of impropriety and environmental and social harms,” said the civil society source. “It’s very sad, because the CAO has always been the kind of beacon of accountability of any kind of institution, public or private. No more.”

Margaux Day, policy director at Accountability Counsel, a nonprofit that works closely with impacted communities who’ve filed complaints against the IFC and other international financial institutions, said she was grateful Boulet was withdrawn and expressed support for his replacement, but said the trend was worrisome. “It is concerning to us to see additional hires with that type of bank background,” she said. “And if you have too many people who are IFC- or bank-minded, communities will start not trusting the mechanism and it will be seen as just an arm of the bank.”

On top of that, said Day, “The IFC’s track record for remedying findings of noncompliance is bleak.” Her organization looked closely at 41 cases where the CAO had found the IFC culpable, and in only nine of them did they commit to any type of remedy. In those cases, rather than offering meaningful compensation to victims, they often simply made promises of improvement.

...

SEVEN YEARS AFTER David Nanzai discovered the note on his desk, the case remains unresolved and officially unsolved, and the victims uncompensated. The teachers we spoke to for this story have all left Bridge schools. But the IFC is working on a new framework to deal with such “negative externalities.”

 

[mastermind]

And if you are interested in the discussion This is Revolution, here: