A solar school that arrives on a truck, teaches offline and shares its power with the village.
Lantern 1 in Ewossa, Nigeria: under construction.
Design visualization
“Basic education is meant to be free and a basic human right.”
A child in a village is every bit as bright as a child in Lagos or London. What she doesn’t have is a fair start: a school close enough to walk to, with light to learn by.
So we designed a school that comes to the village, instead of asking the village to come to it. It brings its own power, its own connection and its own tutor, with a trusted adult living upstairs. It costs a child nothing.
Read our storyA Lantern starts life as a site-office container, the kind a crane drops onto a building site. We fit it out as a classroom, make it cheap to run, and make it look after itself.
A 40-foot container with 24 self-paced learning stations, cooled and secured.
A 20-foot home stacked above the door, so a trusted local facilitator lives on site.
The Lantern makes its own electricity. No grid needed.
The battery is planned larger than the classroom needs, so the surplus can go to the village: one metered cable to a public building, a clinic if there is one.
A satellite link, shared as free, filtered public Wi-Fi: an hour per device, every day.
Lessons and the tutor run on the Lantern itself, so learning carries on with the dish down.
Four stilts in the ground.
Drop it on.
Open the doors.
Connect it. It’s live.
Maths
Twelve mangoes. Three baskets. How many mangoes go in each basket?
A five-minute lesson, a worked example, three practice questions. Then the check.
An example of how a lesson might begin.
Each child learns at their own pace with a tutor that runs on the Lantern itself. Master a topic and you earn tokens. Every token buys fifteen minutes of filtered browsing, or fifteen minutes of play.
Version 1 teaches Maths, English and Coding to children aged 10 to 15.
The plan climbs further: 17 subjects on one ladder, from a first click to university-level material. See the curriculum map
Play is planned too: a game library at every Lantern, matches with children at other Lanterns, and games built by Lantern children themselves.
Try a lessonEvery lesson a child masters is recorded, objective by objective. Over time, those records show us who is flying. Then we go and get them, and put scholarships at other institutions in front of them. That is our goal, and it is the point of the whole thing.
“I don’t want to localise someone else’s AI for Africa. I want Africans building African solutions.”
Learner records stay private. Donors only ever see totals, never a name or a face.
A child who is flying can keep climbing: the curriculum is planned up to university level and beyond. See the ladder
Maths
English
Coding
The ambition: the best teachers in the world building courses for free, so a child in a village learns from the best minds, at their own pace.
Teach a course with usLantern 1 stands on the founder’s family land in Ewossa, a village in Edo State, Nigeria. It is under construction, and it isn’t raising funds.
It is the first of five, and the first real test of everything on this page.
A cover from Ewossa, the place of first issue. The word Ewossa is lettered large, each letter showing a design of Lantern 1 on its ground. The Lantern 1 stamp is cancelled in Ewossa, build in progress. The cover is addressed to the next village, village to be confirmed.
Lanterns 2 to 5 are planned and open for support. Tear a stamp from the sheet and address your letter.
Lantern 1Under construction.
Nigeria. Village to be confirmed.
Ghana. Village to be confirmed.
Kenya. Village to be confirmed.
Rwanda. Village to be confirmed.
Estimated target$100,000 to $140,000
Raised so far Being confirmed
Each target covers
Both containers and the fit-out · Solar power, battery and compute · Satellite connection · Transport to the village · Land registration and first-in-country legal setup · Three years of running costs · 15% overhead.
Notice to sendersTargets are planning estimates in US dollars. Funds raised are being confirmed and will appear only once verified. A Lantern is built only once it is fully funded.
Twenty-five Lanterns by 2030 is the plan. A thousand by 2050 is the goal: in villages and developing regions across the globe, a million children learning by their own light.
We are building towards it one Lantern at a time, starting in Ewossa.
Read where it startedFour Lanterns are planned and waiting for light. Choose one to help light, or talk to us about funding a whole Lantern and naming it.