 Welcome back, you're still watching the Breakfast on Plus TV Africa and the Spelling Bee Contest. Spelling Bee Contest is one in which participants are eliminated as soon as they misspell a word or those participants are scored based on the number of words they spell correctly. It apparently is an American term and it was its first appeared in print in 1875. Well registration has commenced for the 11th edition of the annual Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi Spelling Bee Competition for Primary and Secondary Schools in River State and this is sponsored by the Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas Limited. We have joining us to give us details of this. Mr. Stanley Echefu, who is the President-elect and Chairman Spelling Bee Committee Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi. I'm sorry about that. We have Mr. Chinwe Ekoong Asanga, our President Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi. Mr. Asanga, good morning to you. So we have Chinwe Ekoong Asanga, President of Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi and also joining us alongside him is Stanley Echefu, President-elect and Chairman of the Spelling Bee Planning Committee. Gentlemen, sorry for the mix-up and thanks for joining us right here on the breakfast. Thank you Kofi. My pleasure to be here this morning. All right, all right. And give us a history of the Spelling Bee organized by the Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi in Portugal. I've been in Portugal for nine years and I do know that the Rotary Club takes Spelling Bee competitions very importantly. I've happened to be a volunteer a few times for the Rotary Club in Portugal. I can't forget it. And why does the Rotary Club embark on such a project as a Spelling Bee competition? Okay Kofi, thank you so much and once again it's my pleasure to be on your library lecture today to talk about the Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi Spelling Bee and actually in 2011 the Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi decided to start a Spelling Bee competition and the objective of this program is to hold an annual Spelling Bee competition for all primary and when it started was for secondary schools in river states to drive and actualize the state educational groups and aspiration. Why also at the same time reinforcing the Rotary International as a focus on basic educational literacy and new generation as core values and all that. So that was the idea behind the Spelling Bee and of course if you look at the trends that we have over the years you will see that we have a lot of high failure rates in the aptitude test and students you don't even know that from the university they find it difficult to spare words correctly. Many a time if you're poaching to look at applications when graduates first that are applying for jobs and all that you find a lot of spelling errors and all that in the applications and then that I begin to wonder you know for graduates. So in 2011 the Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi decided to go into the Spelling Bee competition and it is an intervention of the club and we have a kind of objective and we try to achieve the Spelling Bee program. Number one is to improve educational quality of the schools by introducing a heady competition and number two is also to introduce educational activity that will increase the capacity of students to perform well in English and aptitude test as well as having fun in the process and totally to create an opportunity to refocus the schools around growth and value creation. So this intervention of Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi in the era of Spelling Bee and like we always say the slogan of the Spelling Bee is beyond words and I must say that Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi has done quite a lot in the era of Spelling Bee and we have made a lot of improvements and achievements. Interesting. Let's go over to you Stanley Chefu. This has been on for some time as it's been pointed out by our first guest this should be the 11th edition or 11th year since 2011. What's the experience of record and the journey been like so far for the Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi in River State with the Spelling Bee competition? Okay once again the Spelling Bee competition when we began in 2011 we had 51 schools that took part in the middle edition in 2011 and as I speak with you as a time we had the 10th edition on March 2020 we had a thousand schools both for primary and secondary from 51 schools to a thousand schools and that is quite a lot of improvement over a period of 10 years and if you look at what it has been from when we started the Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi Spelling Bee has grown in leaps and bounds and of course one of the achievements we can talk about is that when we started many people here in River State were not familiar with the Spelling Bee because as I speak with you today many schools parents look forward towards the Spelling Bee and of course most also are going ahead creating Spelling Bee clubs for their students in the various schools so I must say that it has been a worthwhile experience for us here in Trans-Samadi and I'm pretty proud of what we have done so far. Okay let's speak about it at this point Mr. Chinwe Kowansanga you are the president of Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi Pohakut is the the the registration still on what has been the response what has the response been like the schools still interested in something like this you know that COVID-19 sort of like dampened interest in some public activities and all that is the registration still on and can other schools who have not yet registered plug into this program. Thank you Kofi the registration is still on and we're still getting calls from schools and like this morning I got about three calls of them from different school proprietors who said they just realized that the jingles were on but of course that's their own mistake but I informed them to go ahead and register because it is still on. Okay interesting so for those who want to register who are listening right now how can they do that which schools is this is this competition open to are you looking at schools all over river state or you have schools just in your catchment area we know that this is Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi but you have a catchment area and and if so how can those schools who have not yet registered do so. Okay we have our forms for those who have not registered we have they can pick up our forms from the seminary at room Ibuquem and then they can also pick up our forms from online there's www.clubbrunner.com it's online and it's not only meant for those in our catchment area because river state as a whole is our catchment area so we have it in some schools in different communities in different local governments Borneo Island is also part of the communities but then we have our phone numbers on the if they hear the jingles we have our phone numbers if they reach out to any of us we can get across to them with the forms so it's not just in our wet Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi is president but all over river state fantastic fantastic this this this competition as we said earlier is sponsored by the Nigerian liquefied natural gas company or limited and that's quite impressive and what's the relationship been like with the NLNG uh limited and Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi and have you had you know a smooth ride with sponsorship coming your way over the past 11 years not quite this is actually the first time we have a professional body you know um sponsoring us we've not really had any interaction with NLNG or any other big um organization to say rather we have um supporters you know in little quantities but it has always been managed sponsored by Rotary Club of Trans-Samadi and um I would wish to add that um since this is our first time with NLNG we hope to have other companies you know reaching out to sponsor us because our dream is to go beyond river state to go beyond them Nigeria and looking at the fact that a lot of other competitions which are not academic based are sponsored by big companies looking at this one which touches everybody because it's from our children upwards and their future we are also using this opportunity to reach out to other big companies to come in like you know next year and subsequent years to do the good job NLNG has done I most recommend NLNG for doing this they are the first big company to reach out interesting interesting Saniya Chefu um the spelling bee model is is quite unique because it it it relies on words being spelled correctly and I like I said earlier I've been at a couple of your events as a volunteer reader and it's quite interesting to see the words that are being read out for these children and how they're able to spell the words um what level of schooling are you look are we talking about here and then how easy is it for these these students to you know to manipulate themselves are they aware around these words okay thank you thank you Kofi uh I'm glad you remember you've been part of this spelling bee sometime in the past as one of the pronouns thank you for that for sharing the past anyway if you look at the spelling bee as a piece the spelling bee has a model and I think the model we have adopted for the spelling bee has been working for us so perfectly and it might be interesting to know let me mention here that this spelling bee is the only spelling bee anywhere in the world that is free that no child pays anything to participate we have the we have the primary category and we have the secondary category when we started in 2011 it was just the secondary alone but by 2016 when we are coming to the sixth edition of the secondary parents have been requested that we go into primary and that's why we started the primary edition now over the past 10 years what we have done so far the spelling bee has been great if you look at well there was a time we tried to introduce word list for the pupils and all that we did it once and we didn't do it again for the second week we have over 3000 words Kofi it might interest you to know that most of these candidates you know read this word list 3000 words and many of them became conversant and have those 3000 words right inside their head and that's very incredible very impressive and because of that we decided not to introduce the word list for the second week we only give out the word list for the primary but the point I'm trying to make this morning is that you have students that committed competition where they have access to over 3000 words some of them we are able to learn 3000 new words most of the ones they have not seen before and if you look at that that's required a lot of achievement and improvement so so far the morning we have adopted so far are you working very perfectly and I will see that we are indeed moving in the in the right direction and all that all right fantastic and then the benefits I know you've talked about this before but the benefits of spelling bee as as compared to other models of competition educational competitions for for students mrs echo has talked about the sponsorship and the fact that the Rotary Club of Trans somebody has not had sponsorship before now and they just done a good one bringing itself into this one and mrs echo has said is this spelling bee model something that others can can keen to compared to probably a maths and science quiz you know I want you to sell this to to the listening public especially corporate Nigeria why spelling bee why not some other form of competition like the benefits you cannot go you cannot say and take the benefits out I want of our system that it is very very much before you do sciences before you do arts in the schools you of course have to have a hold of your spelling now for this we are getting the spelling bee on ground to give us that spelling then if you are talking about mathematics and other sciences other people can join other people can do what we are doing for for Rotary Club of Trans somebody for now we are doing the spelling bee which is the basic which is the bottom which is the basic stand for every other subject like you know as is as it is English so we are still reaching out to other organizations to sponsor this to help let this stand then as we go on we will have maybe because we started with just secondary schools but parents schools and teachers requested for us to add primary school because of the huge success maybe if there is need and if there is sponsorship and if there is more requests for such we would get maybe mathematics and other competitions in interesting interesting you've been the president of Rotary Club of Trans somebody for some for some time now I'd like you to tell us what Rotary Club of Trans money has been able to achieve in the past years not just in your tenor but in the recent years some of the activities of the club and how important this club is is to life in river state I do know that it's one of the most more visible and pronounced and mentioned Rotary Clubs in in rivers so tell us about the important work that you do Rotary as you know is an international organization and we are professionals we have leaders of communities we have business people in our in in Rotary and that is the same way it is in Rotary Club of Trans somebody and Rotary has several areas of focus that seven areas of focus this basic education and literacy is one of them we have disease prevention we have eye cam and okay disease prevention we have care for a lot of many other people we have care for sanitation we have environment we have so many things we do in the community and out of that seven areas of focus Rotary Club of Trans somebody has done all not just this year since the 37 years of its existence we have reached out to our communities to render help for to restore sites we have reached out to communities for mother and child health we have reached out to communities to to um put up um sanitation needs like um toilets tanks and then support education support um quite a lot of things okay okay and the community all right thank you in one sentence is there an address that those who want to reach out to you can can do that an email address or phone number very quickly yes they can reach out to www dot Rotary Club of Trans somebody dot com they can also reach us through a www dot club runner dot Trans somebody dot com but then our phone numbers are there you can reach out to zero eight zero two three two nine eight five eight one all right all right thank you very much we have our website on instagram on facebook all right all right all right fantastic fantastic i want to thank you very much um uh ching wei kong asangai is the president of Rotary Club of Trans somebody right there in puthaka river state stanley chefu is the president-elect and chairman of the spelling bee committee of Rotary Club of Trans somebody puthaka it's been a pleasure having you on the program ladies and gentlemen thank you thank you thank you very much um and that's uh the much we can take on the on plus tv africa on the breakfast right here on plus tv africa my name is kofi bartels return tomorrow with more on this particular program and please keep watching plus tv my name is kofi bartels good morning