In 2013, AEI was chosen by First Quantum Minerals, a global mining company, to build and run a family of fee-paying schools in the North Western Province of Zambia, in order to educate the children of its own workforce as well as those from the local community. With their financial and operational support, in just two years we commissioned and built six schools from scrubland. Over USD50m of capital investment was committed to this project.

Today, we are providing an outstanding level of education to more than 1,500 children, from Nursery to Year 13. Our schools are broken into three school groups: Trident, Sentinel and Frontier, reflecting their offer and price point

Our three Trident schools are based on the model of world-class independent schools: Trident College provides some of the highest quality boarding and day school provision in Sub-Saharan Africa. It follows a Cambridge curriculum with students sitting iGCSE exams and A Level exams. The College has two preparatory feeder schools offering the International Primary Curriculum.

Our all-through Sentinel schools blend academic rigour with pastoral care, at an affordable mid-range price point. They are mainly day schools with some boarding provision. Students at Sentinel take both iGCSE exams and Zambian national exams, and the schools have a strong focus on literacy, numeracy and STEM subjects.

Our innovative Frontier school aims to offer local parents an alternative to government schooling and provides an excellent standard of enhanced Zambian education for approximately USD1 /day. Frontier Nkisu has already gained outstanding national examination results, demonstrated tangible pupil progress, and has had a profound impact on the local community.

From January 2019, AEI will also operate a secondary Frontier school in partnership with the FQM Trident Foundation Kalumbila. This school intends to alleviate the intense pressure on local government schools, and to offer local secondary students in the area a higher quality education. This school will run the Zambian curriculum and students will take the national exams.

AEI also established a teacher training academy in 2014. The Educore Academy is Zambia’s first fully practice-based teacher education college and offers complete primary and secondary teaching diplomas underwritten by North Rise University, a leading Zambian university with international partners. The academy is certified by the Teaching Council of Zambia. It recruits promising young Zambians, with the dual objective of reducing the brain drain of graduates leaving the country and improving the overall calibre of teachers joining the teaching profession. Recruitment, as well as the programme, place emphasis on maths, literacy and STEM excellence.

The Educore Academy’s vision is to expand this provision to increase the number of excellent quality teachers working in Zambian schools especially in Zambian government schools. Evidence shows that teachers have the greatest impact on student attainment: improving the calibre of this workforce is crucial in improving education standards overall.

AEI also provides support for other government-funded schools within the North Western region of Zambia through its Educore Foundation. Today, the Foundation co-ordinates support for 50 government schools in this region. Schools are regularly monitored and evaluated against a number of agreed indicators of education quality, including teacher and pupil attendance. These results provide a responsive ‘heat map’ of education quality across the region. Schools are held to account for their performance and can compare this to other schools in the region.

The Educore Foundation also runs a more intensive school improvement programme for a smaller group of government schools, aimed at raising student attainment with a focus on functional numeracy and literacy. This programme is based on a mobile mentoring model. The programme has also supported the implementation of interactive e-learning through modern lesson plans and the use of electronic devices in lessons. These interventions have resulted in improvements in student attainment and attendance in all schools.

No part of the planet is urbanizing faster than Sub-Saharan Africa and Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, is no exception. The combination of demographic growth, high foreign direct investment and urbanisation is expected to cause Lusaka’s population to quadruple from 2.5m people today to 10m by 2050. The pace and scale of urbanization are transforming the demand for education.

AEI has taken its Sentinel and Frontier models to Zambia’s capital and is currently building a Sentinel school in the New Kasama area of Lusaka, to open in January 2020. We are also commissioning several Frontier schools, which will be incorporated into newly-built shopping malls around the city.