1 Million Teachers (1MT)

When Hakeem Subair co-founded 1 Million Teachers with fellow MMIE’17 grad Rizma Butt (left), he had a big goal: to improve the quality of teachers in sub-Saharan Africa. Here, he explains the business, how it got started and why better teachers make the world better.

One Million Teachers (1MT) is a reward-based teacher development program. From a learning portal that is optimized for mobile, teachers can engage in accessible, high-quality professional development modules. An online learning community that enables the sharing of knowledge and experiences helps to complement the learning platform. 

In 2008, my wife and I were looking for an appropriate place to leave our daughter, Nadrah, while we were at work. We were not satisfied with what we found available in terms of schools where we lived in Nigeria. So we decided to open our own school. What started with a handful of friends’ children quickly blossomed into a 192-student enterprise. The school was thriving except for one issue: the teachers. While our school was considered one of the best, we still had trouble securing good teachers. I could only imagine the state of other schools. I learned that most public-sector teachers weren’t paid well, and that many only chose to stay in the profession because they had nowhere else to go.

I came to Canada in March 2012. But education back in Nigeria remained in my thoughts. I eventually enrolled in the Master of Management Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at Smith, and with the help of Program Director Shari Hughson and Tina Dacin, Director of the Centre for Social Impact at Smith, began to develop an idea to tackle the issue of poor teacher training. I returned to Nigeria in December 2016 to do some additional market research. My conclusions were corroborated by what stakeholders and researchers all agree on: The most significant resource for transforming education is to transform the teacher. An investment in teachers brings the most return on education. And so 1 Million Teachers was born.

The most fun I’ve had so far was when I travelled to Ghana and Ivory Coast last March and April with teacher candidates from Queen’s University as part of our partnership agreement with the school’s Faculty of Education. During the trip, the teachers worked in various schools, initially as observers and eventually teaching classes. Towards the end, they designed and delivered workshops for the teachers of the schools they visited.