Executive Summary

Project Host:

Project Host: Koloso

Fellows:

Drew Edwards, Social Entrepreneur Fellow
Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, Research Fellow
Catherine Lebel, Research Fellow
Laura White, Team Lead, Social Entrepreneur Fellow

Introduction 

In Zambia, a staggering 98% of 15-year-olds fail to achieve the minimum PISA-D proficiency level in mathematics (OECD, 2017). Across sub-Saharan Africa, learning poverty rates exceed 90% (World Bank, 2024).

Behind these statistics are tens of millions of young lives with limited opportunities and unfulfilled potential - and with rapid population growth placing increasing pressure on already fragile systems, the region is facing a “growing educational crisis” (World Bank, 2025). In response, UNESCO, African Union, and United Nations Children’s Fund (2025) have called for better educational data that is relevant, accessible, and understandable to stakeholders.

Koloso, a Zambian-owned and operated enterprise, helps to address this need by generating, analysing, and distributing reliable learning data in real-time to teachers, parents, school leaders, and policymakers. As a result, Koloso enables teaching, managing, and directing for improved learning outcomes and catalyzes sustainable, systemic change that delivers positive impact at scale.

The Koloso approach leverages digital innovation through high-frequency, low-impact gamified assessments that take just two minutes to complete but yield powerful insights. These insights flow in real-time to every stakeholder in the educational ecosystem: teachers can target instruction with precision, students can focus their efforts where most needed, parents can provide informed support at home, and policymakers can allocate resources based on evidence rather than intuition.

Currently focusing on primary and secondary mathematics - where the learning crisis is most acute - Koloso aims to become sub-Saharan Africa's most affordable and contextually appropriate formative assessment platform across the entire school curriculum, delivering the data that can transform how education systems respond to the region's most pressing challenge.

Organisation’s role & strength

Koloso has the potential to drive improved quality of education in resource-constrained environments through a simple but powerful approach: converting brief student interactions into actionable insights that can drive change at all levels of the educational system.At the heart of the system is the Koloso Challenge - a daily quiz game accessible via mobile and web applications. Students have two minutes to answer ten curriculum-aligned questions that are selected based on their grade level, curriculum requirements, and their teacher's instructional plan. This approach generates robust learning data with minimal disruption to classroom time - and can be used as a homework assignment.

What really sets Koloso apart is how this data is transformed into customised insights for every stakeholder in the educational ecosystem:

• Teachers receive real-time, detailed analytics on individual and class-wide learning, allowing them to identify learning gaps immediately and deliver targeted instruction where it's most needed

• Parents gain real-time visibility into their child's topic-by-topic performance, fostering increased engagement in learning, and meaningful home-school partnerships

• School leaders access comprehensive dashboards showing performance trends across classrooms and subjects, facilitating resource allocation and instructional leadership

• Policymakers obtain aggregated, anonymized data that reveals systemic patterns, supporting evidence-based decision making at regional and national levels

This multi-level approach has generated remarkable market validation: within a few months of its commercial launch, Koloso has already secured almost 10,000 users from 25 subscribing schools and NGOs in Zambia and South Africa - indicating substantial demand for its solution.

As the Koloso community expands, the organization’s intention is to evolve from being solely a data consumer (learning from evidence) to becoming a data provider - creating a substantial repository of learning data in Sub-Saharan African contexts that can inform research, resource allocation, and policy development throughout the region.

Need summary

Having gone to market in October 2024, Koloso is in a pivotal phase of development as it learns from its first customers. Koloso needed support interpreting customer feedback to:

• Refine its sales strategy, so that it can continue to grow and attract investment; and

• Prioritise new features and product developments that are most likely to increase student learning: the primary goal of Koloso’s customers.

In particular, Koloso sought to draw on the literature of low-tech digital assessment interventions in the Global South to create a research-based product development roadmap.

Furthermore, Koloso needed a research framework to define the claims it can make with its existing data and to plan for further evidence-generation and evaluation efforts, ultimately equipping Koloso to ensure it’s achieving its vision of eradicating learning poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Solution summary & next steps

Koloso’s engagement with LEAP has resulted in actionable insights across three deliverables: a research-based product development roadmap, a research framework, and a refined sales strategy. Drawing from these deliverables, the LEAP team has agreed the following recommended actions with Koloso:

Research-Based Product Development Roadmap

This deliverable details relevant existing research, highlighting trust, heterogeneity of outcomes, how best to involve parents, and the potential role of artificial intelligence. Key recommendations are:

1. Conduct qualitative interviews with teachers, parents, and/or students to help determine which factors influence participation rates (e.g., trust) among some schools and/or subgroups, which features are the most popular or least popular, and future changes that would help improve the app.

2. Collect data on parent/family/student demographics to determine if there are different effects of Koloso on students with different characteristics (e.g., family income level, student gender, etc.). This can inform changes to the app so that it may best serve diverse groups.

3. Help parents to accurately interpret student performance data to enable an understanding of student learning.

4. Consider developing an AI-guided experience of feedback and quiz problem selection, facilitated with teacher input, to increase student learning.

Research Framework

This deliverable reviews prior research relevant to app-based assessment and intervention. It then provides recommendations to better display existing data, collect new data, and conduct a rigorous assessment of app effectiveness. Key recommendations are:

1. Collect/calculate/present additional data, such as student reaction time, to highlight a different aspect of student performance.

2. Identify individual and group performance on specific questions to highlight potential areas of strength or weakness.

3. Conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT), quasi-experimental design, or pre-post assessment to make conclusions about the effectiveness of the app on desired outcomes (e.g., teacher preparation time).

4. Incorporate demographic data (from research-based product development roadmap recommendation #2 above) into these analyses to identify and address discrepancies by gender, income, etc.

Sales Strategy

This deliverable consists of stakeholder persona outlines for teachers and parents at local and international private schools in Zambia, as well as a market database with potential customer schools across Sub-Saharan Africa. Key recommendations are:

1. Develop flexible value propositions that address core stakeholder needs across segments:

   1. Teachers: Emphasize how Koloso reduces assessment workload for teachers while providing actionable insights to improve student outcomes.

   2. Parents: Focus on how real-time data enables timely, personalized support for their children.

2. Expand and leverage the customer database as a strategic asset for growth. Expand the database with knowledge of schools in Zambia in the private school market segment and eventually the government school segment. Use this data to identify high-potential prospects, optimize outreach timing, and tailor communications.

3. Utilize the value propositions and database list to refine sales strategies for each respective segment to reach decision-makers effectively. Combine direct engagement with school leadership, teacher workshops, and digital communication channels to build relationships and provide ongoing support to all stakeholders.

4. Prioritize product development based on core user needs while maintaining flexibility. Focus on developing features according to the product roadmap. Then establish a roadmap for expansion to additional subjects beyond mathematics.