2017 was bright, 2018 will be brighter!
On behalf of the whole team, we’d like to wish you a bright and successful 2018. Last year was a good year for our investors, and a great year for our students. Our focus for 2018 will be on growth so more investors, and even more students, can share in the value created by the degree programs offered at our partner universities.
To date, Brighter Investment has supported 130 students. 98 are in different years of their education, 12 have started their national service (a mandatory internship). Out of the remaining 20, 18 students are repaying, 1 has earned a scholarship from the MasterCard Foundation for a Master’s degree in the US and 1 has extended his national service assignment at a mining company as we agreed that it will improve his career prospects in the longer term.
49% of the students are pursuing a science degree (mostly applied sciences), 27% of the students are pursuing an engineering degree, 13% an IT related degree and 11% a business related degree (accounting, finance, business etc.). As described in a previous post, our annual salary research shows that Science and Technology graduates are still the highest earners in Ghana. Business and commerce degrees, the laggards last year, have caught up a bit and saw the largest income growth.
Unfortunately we had to stop support for additional Ghanaian vocational training students. We found that overhead costs per student are higher for vocational training students while total loan amounts are significantly lower. At the moment, Brighter Investment cannot profitably support vocational training students in Ghana. Our focus will be on university and polytechnic degrees for now, but we hope that in the future economies of scale and more efficient operations will allow us to resume support at quality vocational training programs.
With another year added to our track record, and more students in the program, we’ve started to show that our selection algorithm has indeed been selecting students that outperform their average peer. 0% of our university and polytechnic graduates is unemployed where 10% was expected. 0% of students have dropped out of university, where 0.7% per semester is typical, and 0% of our students have failed a semester, where 3% per semester is typical. In addition, for our 2016 cohort, the USD value of graduate salary levels have increased by 4.9%. This means that for the first investors that invested in our 2016 cohort, the projected ROI has been revised upwards from 9% to 10.3% per year as depicted in the graph at the top left of this article. Later this year we will be able to provide our first update for the 2017 cohort.
All in all, we are happy about the results for 2017 and we are excited about seeing what our bright students will accomplish in 2018. If you would like to know more about investing in our students, don’t hesitate to contact Tyson at t.titensor@brighterinvestment.com. If you’d like to apply as a student or recommend a student, you can do so on this website and Richard will be happy to answer any questions you may have about that (r.adarkwah@brighterinvestment.com or message us at www.facebook.com/brighterinvestment). The future is bright!