Togolese Education System

Education is felt to be very important in Togo. Thus Bad goverment has meant money that should otherwise go to pay for the Education needs have been moved elsewhere.

Most of the schools in Togo have little in the way of equipment, no electricity, and the language spoken in the classroom is the second or even third language for most children. Whilst schools Teachers do not receive salaries for months at a time and no funding there are suprises. Despite these difficulties, literacy rates are among the highest in Africa.

Most of the schools in Togo are state schools, but there are also private schools, run by Christian or Islamic organisations, or by individuals (usually former teachers). Some of the private schools in Lomé have excellent facilities and provide a first-rate education.

The secondary schools in Togo follow a similar curriculum to those in France and French is the language used in school.


The Togolese Education system thus limited in its reach in terms of coverage of the nation is reputed to be one of the most thorough in the world.

Schools schools have up to a 2 hour lunch break, with school ending at 5:00 to 6:00 p.m., whereas Private schools tend to insist on EVERYONE lunching at school, thus having a shorter break, which ends the day at 4:00 to 4:30 p.m. Another surprising factor is that these Private schools are NOT overpriced, with lunch being the greatest expense. There are certainly exceptions to this, especially private non-parochial schools.

Togolese education is centralized with a nationwide curriculum imposed by the Ministry of Education that ensures national uniformity. This curriculum is dense and demanding. The approach to education is aimed towards the examination process at both the secondary and university levels.



Achievements in Technically minded the subjects such as Mathematics, Sciences, French,Geography are considered to be more important than other subjects such as Music and sports. This has been a remnant of the First Colonial master Germany.


Unlike many other nations around the world the Togolese Education
moves students up and down ‘sets’ year groups. If a child fails to meet the criteria to advance to the next level they may even repeat the year. However, this is not nearly as dramatic as most people think and does not carry the same connotations of failure as it would in the UK. A third of all pupils repeat a year at sometime during their school career in Togo. In fact, to repeat a school year in Togo is so common, there is even a phrase to describe it: “redoubler la classe”.

Peter Jones Strikes Out

Just heard from a friend at Peter Jones one of the UK's top self-made entrepreneurs has set out on his own .

Peter Jones originally was a start on a BBC program called Dragon's Den . Dragons' Den is a series where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to secure investment finance from our the "dragons" - elite business entrepreneurs.

Whilst Peter Jones made his first million at age 16 by launching a tennis academy . At the age of 28 he was managing computing business for corporate giant Siemens Nixdorf in the UK. In 1998 he founded Phones International Group, a telecommunications firm that now generates revenues in excess of £200m.
His business interests range from telecoms, leisure, publishing as well as TV and media. Peter has won many national awards, including Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year in 2001.
Aged 40, Peter is considered to be one of the UK’s leading young businessmen.

Simon appears to have left the BBC's Dragons Den and now is going to move to start a new show titled "Tycoon" to be hosted on the ITV1 Channel.

Aswell as providing funding for any new or existing business , Simon also takes a role in the business . Bringing an existing corporate management team and experience can only help any entrepreneur make it.

Fancy pitching your idea to Simon ? the follow the URL http://peterjones.tv .

Good luck.

GoogleOS or FirefoxOS

Jason Calcanis has an interesting post on the possibility of a Google OS to replace Microsoft Windows coming out sometime next year? I’m not sure I agree on the timescale but I think it is well argued and certainly worth thinking about.

Think about being Dell or Gateway and being offered a) a free OS and b)
1-5% of the revenue from Adsense on the computer? How can you turn that
down when it’s going to be double or triple your margin on a PC?!

Although this is not a new topic of conversation but of late I too have begun to think about what my future OS should/will be - Vista, Ubuntu or OS/X? Some of you may recall I have been experimenting with having all of my data online and in a non-proprietary formats. i.e only ODF, MP3, JPEG and not XLS, WMA etc.

I have also replaced Microsoft Office with Google Apps and switched to using only Firefox because it is cross platform enabling me to finally have seperation of data from app and seperation of app from OS.

On the plus side this experiment has enabled me to try Ubuntu (Linux) and Mac (OS/X) because of Firefox working the same on both of these platforms just as it does on the Windows platform. Equally all of my data is online so I am no longer tied to a single PC or single OS.

Of course it is not all roses and where I gain cross-platform compatibility, portability and data retreival, I also Iose some functionality and depth of features. But now a days more often than not I simply boot up one of the PC’s and load Firefox to access my email, RSS aggregator and docs. So it got me thinking do I need an expensive OS (upgrade) and desktop apps, for me a PC with lots of RAM and some storage is ideal for me.

So maybe Jason has a point what if Google develop an OS using one of the Linux distro’s and load it with Google Desktop Search, Picasa and Firefox. What if they do give all of this away and pay PC manufacturers a cut of the advertising revenue. It certainly is fesible and actually not that impossible. The “Windows Tax” has long been a bind for PC manufacturers with slim margins. Never say never. Right now that is big change and possibly too big for many people used to local storage and desktop apps but a free lite OS with similar features might occur one day but I do not think 2007 will be the year but maybe 2008/9. For now I think Firefox is the OS.

Reevoo

You will possibly have already read about Reevoo, the UK-based online customer review aggregator, securing $5M in a Series-A funding round led by Eden Ventures. What may have got lost in the news was what they plan to do next.

First, the basics. The firm plans to use the money to expand its ‘Reevoomark’ service, which generates product reviews from confirmed purchasers and places them on sites for retail partners including Comet, Dixons, Currys, Jessops, Orange and Misco. Reevoo is also planning to expand into the sectors for DIY, baby goods and sports retailers, and launch in Europe. Oh, and they run on Ruby on Rails BTW.

Ben Griffiths, CTO of Reevoo tells Vecosys: “The reaction’s been fantastic. We share reviews across all our retail partners so the more partners we have in an industry, the better it is for all the retailers. So they’re happy to see us expanding.”
Reevoo’s service is designed to address three needs: online retailers want growth out of their sites, and need to find ways to drive higher sales, so carrying ‘trusted reviews’ generated (almost for free) by other consumers, helps. Shoppers themselves are looking for the opinions of people like them when working out what to buy. Lastly, fake reviews (by shop owners, manufacturers, you name it) makes trust is a big issue on the web. Where there is UGC there is also bullshit, as we know. Luckily, Reevoo cuts through this, by getting people who have actually bought the stuff to review it.

Oddly enough, the press announcement didn’t make much of the fact that only confirmed purchasers receive a questionnaire asking them to review a product. So in fact there is a fourth aspect to this service, namely the warm fuzzy CRM-induced fantasy that their turgid thoughts about a vacumn cleaner are being listened to, the poor souls.

Reevoo also plans to develop community and networking functions on its own site.

Now, what do you suppose this could mean? Well we can safely assume it will mean allowing people to find user profiles, tag other people’s reviews and probably perhaps share/embed them on other sites or blogs. Looking at Crowdstorm in the UK and ThisNext, one can see generally where Reevoo is going. The combination of trusted reviews and social networking has a virtuous circle. And it’s a good place to be in the centre of that circle. Imagine buying products based on reviews from people that you know and trust. That has a lot of pull - and push.

The question is, can Reevoo pull it off? Well, it has the cash, it has the momentum and the customers, and crucially it appears to have zero competitors. We think they’ll do ok…

What do others think? Paul Fisher of First Capital, who admittedly advised Reevoo, says on his blog that the Reevoo …

… provides a trust filter to help consumers work out WHAT to buy. I have blogged before about how much value there is in delivering what the consumer wants without them having to ask for it. For me this remains an area of white space on the web and one where VCs have been making their bets this year. Last.fm does exactly the same thing for music. The other exciting thing is that if Reevoo can dominate the part of the purchase process that focuses on WHAT to buy rather than where to buy it will become an enormously powerful platform for shaping purchase decisions.

Nic Brisbourne of Esprit Capital Partners blogged:

There are some great companies out there working in this area - and there should be rich pickings for the winners. Getting the answers right will help us take e-commerce to the next level. Companies I like that have reviews as an important part of their strategy include Crowdstorm, Trusted Places, Reevoo, and TouchLocal.

Imageloop

Imageloop, a German firm which pitches itself as a European contender to Slide.com, has raised some €1M from a syndicate of investors. It has an application allowing users to create an online slideshow of photos which can be embedded into a site or displayed on a desktop.

The company’s new investors include Dr. Andreas Weigend, Principal at People & Data (San Francisco) and former Chief Scientist with Amazon.com (Seattle), the private-equity firm Otto Wolff GmbH, Bernd Schlobohm and Gerd Eickers (founders of German broadband provider QSC) and internet business angel Mehrdad Piroozram. To date over €1 million has now been invested in imagelooop.

Stefan Riehl, imagelooop’s COO, seems to thinks its free, animated slideshows bridge the gap between YouTube and Flickr, but we happen to think this is a slightly wrong-headed assumption and doesn’t apply. Just call it a slide show for pete’s sake. So far it’s free to use imagelooop, but they plan to introduce premium membership.

The question is, is this just a feature or a real business? Ok, Slide.com recently raised about $8 million bringing it to a total of about $20 million in funding. That still doesn’t make it a business.

Mologogo

Mologogo,
a Java application that uses my phone's GPS to show me where I am on a zoomable map. The latest beta version adds local search so I can see the nearest Starbucks, atm or sushi bar plotted on the map in relation to my location - awesome. There's a good overview with screenshots of Mologogo at the MAKE:Blog. Mologogo currently only works on iDEN phones and Windows Mobile Smartphone and PPC devices. For other handsets, another GPS enabled Java app MGMaps, comes in several versions that run on most Java equiped phones and can use either external GPS units over Bluetooth or the handsets built in GPS.

Mobile Web

Mobile web advertising comes of age.
I credit this almost entirely to AdMob, the startup that took the Google AdSense model and applied it to mobile. Seems like a simple thing to do but it sure caught on. Before 2006, it was rare to see an ad on a mobile site, AdMob opened the flood gates and now it's just the opposite - mobile sites without ads are the exception. What's so great about that? Simply this, advertising makes the mobile web economically viable. Before AdMob, the off-portal mobile web was dying, there was no way to pay the bills except perhaps with porn and gambling. Only the carriers made money with the mobile web and carriers don't innovate. AdMob did an end run around the carriers making it possible for startups to monetize innovation.