Nearly 1 in 3 children does not complete primary school in Africa. More disturbingly, over 40M children learn so little while in school that they are not much better off than those who never attend school. This situation is fuelled by the current teacher to learner ratio (1:65), textbook to student ratio (1:5) and lack of access to quality revision materials by low income background learners.
Shupavu291 can be accessed offline on basic feature phones. The offline mobile services enables us to reach underserved learners. Learners dial *291# to register and subscribe on the platform. Upon subscription, the learners get access to national curriculum topical lessons by class level, quizzes to clarify their understanding after every lesson, revision papers, offline Wikipedia to search for content of their choice, and an ‘Ask a Teacher’ feature. Questions from learners, by grade level, are matched to teachers with mainstream classroom experience in that subject for real-time responses. This personalised experience brings the teacher to learner ratio to 1:1.
Since starting, we have reached 12M+ learners, who have taken over 79 million SMS lessons and asked more than 14 million questions. According to an internal study, learners on our platform scored 22.7% higher on tests than their peers on average, with about 97% of the learners mentioning improved test scores.
In partnership with Safaricom, a leading MNO in Kenya, we started offering Shupavu291 in Kenya in 2011. Within 2 years, Shupavu291 was Kenya's number one mobile learning platform. This caught the attention of other leading MNOs in Africa with whom we have partnered with to offer Shupavu291 (aligned to national curriculum) in Rwanda, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone.
With these expansions, we reached 4.1M learners in the last 2 years alone. During that time, learners consumed over 15.7M lessons and asked over 8,400 questions on a daily basis.
In the next 2-3 years, we intend to build an 'Ask a Teacher' bot - a complete digital space for questions and answers between learners and an automated response system. We also intend to expand into 2 additional African countries starting with Ethiopia.
Getting the biggest impact at the lowest cost is what we are after and we believe that we can always achieve this by working in synergy. Investing in the right partnerships is our core strength and we are open to working with other organiaations to grow, expand and reach more underserved learners . Should you be interested in partnering with us, please reach us at info@enezaeducation.com.
