Fair questions. Straight answers.

A free school in two shipping containers. Below, a 40-foot classroom with 24 learning stations. Above, a 20-foot home where the facilitator lives. Solar panels on the roofs power it, a battery inside stores the sun, and a satellite dish connects it.

It ships whole on a standard container truck. Put four stilts in the ground, drop it on, open the doors, connect it, and it is live.

Lantern 1 is under construction in Ewossa, Edo State, Nigeria, on the founder’s family land.

Lantern 2 is planned for Nigeria; Lantern 3 for Ghana; Lantern 4 for Kenya; Lantern 5 for Rwanda, falling back to Uganda, then Tanzania. Their villages are still to be confirmed.

NoteThe plan lights Lanterns 2 to 5 between Q2 and Q4 2027, each only once it is fully funded. Those are plans, not promises.

Perhaps. Tell us about it and it becomes a candidate. That is not a promise: we choose every site ourselves, never donors, through the same six steps. A desk screen, a visit to the village council, a technical survey, a count of the children, securing the land, and an agreement signed at a public council meeting.

A village needs at least 150 children aged 5 to 17 within a 2 km walk, no free school with electricity and computers within 5 km, a road a container lorry can use in the dry season, an undisputed plot of about 20 by 15 metres, a clinic or school close by to share power with, and water.

NoteLanterns rely on satellite internet that is available in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda today, so those come first.

The estimated targets for Lanterns 2 to 5 run from $100,000 to $140,000, depending on the country.

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 and 15% overhead. So a fully funded Lantern is built and runs for its first three years.

NoteThese are planning estimates, not quotes or actual spend. A Lantern is built only once it is fully funded.

The sun. Solar panels on the roofs feed a battery inside, in a closed system with no grid connection. The battery is deliberately sized larger than the classroom needs.

The surplus goes to the village through one sub-metered cable to a public building nearby: a clinic if there is one, otherwise the primary school. Never to private homes.

NoteThe final battery size depends on a load study, so we don’t quote storage or autonomy figures yet.

No. Lessons and the tutor run on the Lantern itself, so teaching carries on with the satellite dish down. It syncs overnight when it can.

When the connection is up, the Lantern shares it. Free, filtered public Wi-Fi: 60 minutes per device per day, with filtering always on.

The platform teaches. Each child learns at their own pace: a five-minute lesson, a worked example, practice, then a quiz. They get a score, they’re told what to work on, and they go again until they’ve mastered it. The tutor is scoped to the lesson and never hands over answers.

A facilitator runs the Lantern and lives upstairs: a paid local employee, police-checked. Not a classroom teacher: the person who opens the doors six days a week, keeps it running and looks after the children.

Our ambition is for the best teachers in the world to build the courses, pro bono.

The curriculum is planned across 17 subjects, from Digital skills, Maths, English and Coding to Sciences, History, Engineering, Agriculture, Health, the Arts and more. It is written in waves. Wave 1 is Digital skills, Maths, English and Coding for ages 10 to 15; the rest follow, wave by wave.

One ladder of 18 levels runs through every subject, from a first mouse click to university-level material and beyond. Levels describe the material, not the child: mastering what comes before is what unlocks the next step, never age. A learner who already knows a module can skip it by passing a Challenge Test: at least 90% overall, with no objective below 75%.

A small AI tutor on the Lantern helps offline. When the Lantern is connected, frontier AI models help with deeper questions. The tutor guides and never just gives the answer, and children’s names, faces and IDs are never sent to an AI provider. All of this is the plan: today, a handful of sample lessons can be tried on this site.

Passing earns tokens, and tokens buy browsing or play time. 1 token = 15 minutes of filtered browsing or of play, earned only through mastery. Every child also gets 15 free minutes a day.

Tokens are earned only through mastery, and they are never exchanged for cash or goods.

Play is earned. The only way to get tokens is to master something, and the only way to spend them on play is to have earned them first.

Harder modules earn more, and going beyond your level earns a bonus. But every repeat earns less than the last. Straight away, a repeat earns about a third, and by the fourth it earns nothing. Come back a week later and a repeat still earns three-quarters. The repeats that pay are the ones that help you remember.

In school hours, learning comes first at the stations. A play or browsing session ends at 45 minutes, and a child can bank at most 3 hours.

NoteThe game library and these rules are the plan. Nothing is running yet.

Every staff member is checked, trained and bound by a signed code of conduct. No child enters the facilitator’s home. Web filtering is always on, with no local override.

A Lantern is free for every child, regardless of family, religion, gender, disability or schooling. We never give a child’s location more precisely than the village, and every published image needs written parental consent, which can be withdrawn; we take the image down within seven days.

NoteOur safeguarding policy is a draft, not yet adopted by the board. The founder is the initial Safeguarding Lead.

Only other Lantern children. Games run on a closed network, and everyone on it is a child enrolled at a Lantern; no one from outside can join.

Players appear as an avatar and their Lantern number, never their name, face or village. There is no free chat, no voice and no private messages, only preset phrases in every Lantern language.

The facilitator is in the room for all play. Every game has an official age rating, and children play only games rated for their age.

Each Lantern keeps its own list of approved games, and the village decides it. The facilitator brings each proposal to a panel of parents and council members, who can be stricter than the rating but never looser. Games rated 16 or over are only for the 15 to 20 evening sessions.

NoteThis is the plan, under our draft safeguarding policy. Nothing is running yet.

Children sign in with their face and an optional PIN; no email or username. Face data and camera footage never leave the Lantern, and footage is overwritten after 72 hours. Tutor conversations are deleted after 30 days, and any record is deleted within 30 days of a request.

Per-learner progress is what lets us spot the children who are flying, so they can be put forward for scholarships. Donors see only totals, never a name, a face or a record. The standard we hold to is the strictest of the four countries’ data laws.

NoteThese are draft policies, awaiting board adoption.

Choose a Lantern and your gift is recorded against it. Choose “where it’s needed most” and we direct it across Lanterns 2 to 5. Every target already includes three years of running costs and 15% overhead.

For a sense of scale, our build plan allows $850 for one air conditioner, $4,500 for the battery and $12,330 for the computers and network.

NoteFunds raised are being confirmed and appear on the site only once verified. We never auto-update totals from payments.

Keep a Lantern lit is a monthly gift of $560 to $860, which matches one Lantern’s running costs after year three in our plan.

Join the keepers lets four people share that, from $140 a month each.

Yes. That’s Light a Lantern: $100,000 to $140,000 depending on the country. As lead donor, you name the Lantern, and the name is painted on its side.

It starts with a conversation. Write to give@villagelantern.org or use the contact page.

Online gifts go through Stripe Checkout, so your card details never touch our site. You’ll get a payment receipt by email.

Monthly donors can change their card, or change or stop their gift, at any time on Stripe’s secure page: sign in with the email you gave when you started. Or write to give@villagelantern.org. If online giving isn’t open yet when you visit, you can email a pledge instead.

Village Lantern owns its brand, its learning software and its relationship with every donor.

Its founder is Omi Iyamu. He has spent more than 17 years in technology, including at Google and Microsoft, and is building the learning platform himself. He takes no salary. Lantern 1 stands on his family’s land in Ewossa.

Because they’re strong, cheap and made to travel. A container arrives whole on a standard truck, stands on four stilts above the ground, and brings its own power and connection. No bricks, no grid, no waiting for a cable.

The operating plan is 25 Lanterns by 2030. The founder’s vision is 1,000 Lanterns by 2050, in villages and developing regions across the globe, educating 1,000,000 children.

Underneath it is a simple idea: talent is everywhere; opportunity isn’t. Find the brilliant ones, go and get them. Africans building African solutions.

NoteThat is a goal, not a forecast. Today there is Lantern 1 of 1,000, under construction in Ewossa.