M-Shule

Poverty is the greatest obstacle to African girls’ education. 90% of the African population is low-income; only 2 out of 5 girls complete secondary school. Girls are not prepared with resources, classroom time, or personalised attention. Adaptive learning technologies can bridge the gap affordably and scalably - but all adaptive platforms are online; <20% of the African population has access to online tools. But they do use basic phones and SMS - why not for personalized learning? 

M-Shule is the first mobile learning platform to combine AI with text messaging to deliver tailored tutoring and education to girls from low-income populations. Swahili for “mobile school”, M-Shule’s platform delivers content on the most basic offline phones. Then M-Shule analyzes performance data and shares insights with parents, teachers, and organizations. By making advanced learning innovation possible with the simplest feature phone, M-Shule unlocks new opportunities for millions of girls across Sub-Saharan Africa.

42% of girls in Sub-Saharan Africa drop out of primary school - the highest rate in the world. Poverty forces parents to make short-term decisions, keeping girls out of school to work or marry young. In turn, many girls grow up without learning how to read or write, excluding them from future economic opportunities. But if girls received personalised, quality learning support they need to thrive - in or out of the classroom - and parents had the data to see the positive impact of their investment in education, twice as many girls could escape learning poverty. 

Adaptive learning technology, which uses AI to tailor content to learners’ personal performance, has been proven to increase skills and knowledge for marginalized learners up to 100%. However, all of these adaptive options are online, and fewer than 20% of the African population has access to internet and smart devices. Only 35% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa will be online by 2023 instead using basic feature phones that can call and text. Without accessible technology, there are few to no options for girls to affordably continue their education.

Meaning “mobile school” in Swahili, M-Shule’s platform uses AI to provide personalized learning, life skills development, and data tracking over SMS. Learners access academic content on the most basic phones, with no need for smartphones or the internet. After signing up over text, the adaptive learning platform uses SMS interactions to deliver personalized lessons and micro-courses that adjust difficulty level and topic pathways to learners’ individual needs, backgrounds and performance. Learners receive harder content as they do well or easier content if they need to build foundational knowledge. Their learning profile continuously updates their progress and selects the best next sets of content and information to maximize their potential. 

As learners progress, the platform analyzes data and delivers reports and analytics to parents, teachers and schools through SMS and web. These insights allow organizations to save time in measuring performance, identifying learner needs, and making better decisions. 

M-Shule is the first innovation in the market that makes personalized learning accessible and affordable for all girls, even the vulnerable and low-income. By delivering an all-in-one learning platform possible with the simplest feature phone, M-Shule unlocks new opportunities for millions across Sub-Saharan Africa.

We designed our platform to serve vulnerable low-income learners in Sub-Saharan Africa ensuring that every student has the opportunity to learn no matter their income, age, or gender. We serve 150 million primary students in Sub-Saharan Africa - marginalized communities where 90% of the population is low-income or poor. Our students live in under-served areas, from informal settlements in urban centres, to remote rural regions where families make less than $200 per month. This population owns dumb phones or basic smartphones, but spend little money on data or mobile connectivity. Parents often have insecure incomes and make tough decisions in their daughters’ education - girls are kept home when there isn’t enough money for tuition fees, or taken out entirely. Temporary or permanent interruptions in learning hold girls back. 

We built our platform in collaboration and with feedback from more than 5,000 parents and students as well as 50+ schools. We continue to conduct surveys and interviews to understand how we can improve learning for our students. As one of our users said, M-Shule “equalizes us as parents and students” - building a future where all individuals are economically empowered with the right skills to not just survive, but thrive. 

Inclusive, impactful education for girls in Africa must meet them where they are, leveraging existing resources and communities, and provide the platform to advance skills. We combine the power of AI and adaptive learning with accessibility of SMS to tailor relevant, engaging content for each learner, increasing their skill acquisition; facilitate collaboration and support all stakeholders with data; and make innovation affordable even for low-income learners. This means that girls can continue learning even if they are at home, education interrupted by finances or emergencies; and parents and schools have the information they need to support their specific needs.

Combining best practices in AI with simple SMS unlocks transformative opportunities to upend learning poverty, for as little as $1 per month. M-Shule allows personalized, accessible and affordable tutoring and training to reach every student or teacher - reducing costs and increasing return on educational investment.

Current solutions include “no-tech” class materials or tutors, prohibitively expensive for most families. “Low-tech” platforms like Eneza Education or Arifu use SMS to reach students, but deliver the same content to everyone, leading to low engagement and high attrition. The most impactful “high-tech” adaptive web or app platforms are out of reach due to internet inaccessibility.

Our product is designed to overcome market limitations while taking advantage of user devices, current knowledge, and behavior:

• We are adaptive. We use AI to personalize content for each learner, delivering content of varying complexity to help individuals assess and master skills efficiently. 

• We power data-driven development. Our real-time data and analytics empower schools to get instant insight into individual learners’ performance without extra data collection or resources. 

• We are accessible. We operate entirely through SMS at an affordable cost, drastically reducing education budgets. Users don’t need to worry about airtime charges, data bundles or purchasing smart devices.

M-Shule’s platform leverages artificial intelligence to deliver tailored, bite-sized content to primary school learners based on their specific grade, performance, and needs, all through an accessible SMS and messaging chatbot interface. The AI engine is built on item response theory (similar to algorithms that underpin the GRE or GMAT), which continuously updates each student’s learning profile to deliver the most useful content for them at every step. 

AI - Adaptive learning algorithms match the student to the right content (complexity, curricular, learning history) and generate personalized experiences for every learner.

SMS/chatbot - our simple chatbot interactions can be deployed over SMS or Telegram to reach users, no matter their phone or internet connectivity. 

Data Science - Curates the learners’ personal data, their learning data and platform interactions to improve impact.

We are currently looking into ways we can leverage machine learning to increase learner engagement and come up with more timely interventions in order to support the learners and improve their learning experience on the platform. As the product grows, we envision having diverse options available to users such as digital and online curriculum programs for learners which will be accessible to an even wider audience.

Our adaptive learning backbone means that the instructional content, support (or “scaffolds”), and questions given to a child within a particular lesson is personalized by their measured level of proficiency. We calculate proficiency based on whether they are answering questions correctly/incorrectly, but even more so on which types of questions they are answering correctly or incorrectly. This form of item response theory uses statistical analyses to deliver a more efficient (i.e. personalized) method of assessment and learning. 

Other adaptive learning companies, projects, and research have shown great results in delivering personalized learning through web in the Western world. For example, Knewton, an American web-based adaptive learning software company, has powered better overall exam results, higher rate of growth in performance, increased pass rates, decreased withdrawals, and increased student motivation across primary, secondary, and higher education. Dreambox’s software was positively associated with performance on state tests and learning advancements for disadvantaged students. Geekie, a Brazilian company, proved that adaptive learning works in emerging markets, improving high school student assessment scores by 30%.

We are excited to be the first to bring the same impact to primary school girls in the African context through accessible technologies. 

Demo: https://youtu.be/T_mAKyc5WmU

The steps we will take to bring change are: 

1. Deliver an impactful & engaging adaptive SMS tutoring tool for female students.

-High-quality and expansive content across key academic skills

-Robust adaptive technology to personalize content to learner needs

-Engaging trainings, motivation, and user experience features to engage and excite learners.

2. Provide relevant and useful insights and recommendations to stakeholders.

-Relevant and useful data and reports for parents, teachers, schools, and partners

3. Grow to millions of learners in multiple countries.

-Scalable and powerful user and customer acquisition, onboarding, and support

-Key partnerships with governments, NGOs, and corporates for ongoing growth

The measurable effect will be:

1. Increase in girls' literacy and numeracy performance on classroom, national, and international exams.

-Overall change in performance

-Change in rate of performance increase

- Rate of moving from failing to passing

1. Increase in girls' 21st century skills – digital literacy, self-efficacy, communication, problem-solving, etc. based on qualitative reports. 

2. Changes in girls' absenteeism, drop out rates, and primary graduation.

3. Increase in secondary school enrollment, secondary school graduation, and future employment. 

The wider benefits will be: 

1. Girls build skill of learning to learn, allowing them to adapt, set, and achieve their own pathways to success. 

2. Parents change their mindsets from passive to active participants in their children’s learning, and dedicate themselves to their daughter’s long-term education.

3. Teachers and schools change their classrooms from curriculum-driven to student-driven learning centres, with diverse approaches for different learning needs particularly in response to gender.

4. Communities, national governments, and international bodies use learning evidence and students’ voices to make decisions and drive success for girls. 

Our desired long term change: Every girl child in Sub-Saharan Africa will graduate primary school with the academic and 21st century skills to achieve future economic success. 

Since we launched in mid-2017, we have been able to develop our adaptive learning platform from scratch - including knowledge graphs, student accounts, predictive modeling, generative content tools, data analytics, SMS and chatbot distribution platforms, and more than 40,000 content items in literacy and numeracy. We have sent out 1 million messages in 3 languages and built skills for learners of all ages.

We first piloted literacy and numeracy for primary school students, showing that users improved exam scores 7% higher than non-users after learning for one hour per week. Since then, we have registered 11,000+ primary school learners from more than 80 schools in Kenya. More than 50% of these students are girls. Students reported increasing exam performance by 20%+, as well as improving problem-solving, self-confidence, and digital literacy. 82% of parents said M-Shule had a strong positive impact on their children’s lives. Teachers stated that our reporting improves their own classroom planning and builds confidence in their decision-making, while reducing time on administrative tasks. In an external evaluation run by EWB Canada, we learned that learning communities deeply value the ability to build individual mastery while improving collaboration between stakeholders.

In the next 5 years, we aim to reach more than 1 million girls (and 2 million students total) from low-income and marginalized communities across East Africa.

An affordable, scalable, and personalized SMS-based platform will close the gap in reducing learning poverty and improving economic opportunities for more than 2 million learners in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Through affordable and accessible individualized tutoring in relevant language, students will build skills at their level and pace. They will be more likely to develop foundational skills at the right time, implement more complex concepts earlier on, and improve academic outcomes based on international standards. With our real-time data analytics and formative assessment, teachers, schools, and national decision-makers will be able to quickly identify gaps and make critical resource investments in a matter of weeks or months, not years. Using our individualized teacher toolkit, our teachers will lead more effective classrooms, building their own instructional skills while delivering project-based, child-centered, and 21st century education. 

In the next 5 years, more than 1 million girls will move out of learning poverty. They will master literacy and numeracy skills, increase their likelihood of moving to secondary school, and develop 21st century skills that will enable them for success in their future careers - transforming their entire communities. 

We will scale in partnership with nonprofit organizations and foundations to fund and support learners in Kenya and other markets; telecommunications companies; and public institutions such as school networks to reach these learners.

Strategic - Content contextualization & digital literacy: Curriculum content and digital literacy levels vary widely across communities, and markets, necessitating a flexible approach to learning design, training, onboarding, and user experience.  

Accessibility- M-Shule has powerful scaling potential because it can be accessible on even a feature phone, but it does require some level of phone penetration to ensure any learner may access it, as well as support from telecommunication companies. Lower levels of feature phone penetration and MNO restrictions may be a barrier to growth.

Content contextualization and digital literacy - M-Shule will work with government and content partners to understand curriculum needs and build market-responsive training in local language into the platform to ensure it is as easy to use. Our platform can support any content; we have developed knowledge maps, or pathways of skill acquisition, for numeracy and literacy skills based on best practices that can be easily adapted to local curriculum timelines and requirements.

Accessibility - To mitigate these challenges, M-Shule will work in markets with higher mobile penetration rates to scale efficiently, and then work with governments and partners to promote device access as organic penetration grows. Secondly, we will work directly with MNOs as well as through partners and governments to ensure those partnerships are sustainable.

Full time - 9

Part time - 1

Our team combines experience in African education at scale with technological innovation, that drives us to design learning products for sustainable, ecosystem-level change. Our CEO Claire Mongeau has 9 years’ experience working in accessible education and social business, including managing community engagement across 100,000 learners at Bridge International Academies (the largest low-cost private school chain in the world) in Kenya, and designing programs serving low-income learners in India and the US. Our CTO, Julie Otieno, brings 5+ years of experience working in technology for development, from growth systems at GE to SMS learning at Arifu to vaccine stock management with CHAI. The rest of the team brings more than 40 years of combined experience in learning design, data science, learner experience, research and project management. Finally, we are mentored and advised by experts in the educational and technical fields from Google and Edtech East Africa. 

M-Shule partners with organizations and nonprofits to grow our solution, as well as product partners to enhance our delivery. 

Client and distribution partners: 

• More than 100 low-cost private schools in and around Nairobi, Kenya to expand our learner base. 

• International nonprofits like Danish Refugee Council, VSO International, and Jacaranda Health to reach adult learners and providers with critical vocational skills. 

• Local nonprofits like Jitegemee and Carolina for Kibera to distribute learning content to their supported students. 

Product partners: 

• Content creators like Kytabu to enhance the variety of content available to learners within a project

• Product advisors like Carnegie Mellon Univeristy or Google.org

As a for-profit social enterprise, M-Shule targets nonprofits, multinationals and corporations that need to efficiently reach more users with better learning and training products at scale.  Our B2B revenue model helps SaaS clients educate more learners for less money with: micro-courses, that provide tutoring and training for learners; surveys and assessments; data, insights and analytics; and learner management systems. Organizations can purchase packages of licenses for individual learners, as well as engage us in custom content and feature development. Monthly learner licenses cost as little as $1-$2 per user.

We acquire new clients through content marketing, networking events, and a sales team identifying opportunities in new prospective clients and sectors. To date, we have partnered with nonprofits Carolina for Kibera, Jitegemee, Jacaranda Health, the Danish Refugee Council, and VSO International. We are in conversations with major school chains and education providers, vocational training programs and corporate distributors and anticipate new partnerships closed this year to extend our growth.

We aim to be self-sustaining and profitable with our B2B revenue model. 

We spent 2017 and 2018 building our product and generating minimum revenue, while in 2019 we focused on research, experimentation, and defining the best strategic business model. With our first B2B contract closed in 2019, we now project 2020-2021 will be periods of aggressive scale. We are confident we will grow revenue and move towards profitability with the customer insights and user data we have generated, reaching $250,000 in the next year. We will reach breakeven at scale in early 2022. Gross margin in 2020 will be 45%, which will stabilize at later years above 90%; the first years will be lower margin due to trial periods and expansion, while later years will benefit from economies of scale and decrease in technology costs. By 2024 (year 5), we expect to expand across 10 markets, reach more than 1 million users monthly, and generate millions  in profit. 

Any profit we generate will be reinvested into our company, to support learner growth, greater technical development and impacts, and scaling to more regions.  Over the next year, we plan to work on measures to work as efficiently as possible while minimising operational costs.