MIT Solve

Step 2

Our Solution

Edukasyon.ph

Our solution's stage of development:

Pre-Seed

Our solution:

Edukasyon.ph is a social enterprise in the education technology sector, with a multi-sided platform featuring students, schools and employment pathways-- empowering students discover the right school, track/course, scholarship or career for them, get advice as they make these choices, and apply online to their dream school.

Our pitch:

At Edukasyon.ph, we aim to make education reachable and accessible to every child regardless of their social status. We seek to empower students everyday by being the go-to online portal for all important education to career information as these students discover the right track or course; choose the right career; and apply online to their dream school.

We offer students choice, advice, and convenience.

In our Philippines pilot,Students can search for, and compare, more than 13,000 public or private senior high schools, colleges, or universities nationwide. They can also inquire and apply to more than 200 colleges. They can also search for more than 20,000 listed courses and apply to more than 20,000 scholarships from foundations, corporations, or government.

Additionally, there are 125+ careers tracks on the site where students can find out more about their dream career and the industry they are interested in. Our online portal can be accessed in all devices such as laptops, tablets, or mobile phones as long as it is connected to the internet.

In line with this, our advocacy-driven projects aim to (1) engage with community stakeholders that affect the student’s decision on education and career through our College and Career Awareness Education Seminars (CARES) program; (2) guide the students in their chosen path with our Career Clinics; and (3) offer accessible and reachable education scholarships from our partner foundations and institutions.

Edukasyon.ph is free to all students, parents, and guardians. By using www.edukasyon.ph, students are empowered to make informed choices about their education, and understand how it will prepare them for the career that they seek.

The problem:

PH has 30% youth unemployment rate and broken funnel. 1.5m students finish high school, but only 900k enter higher education, of which 600k graduate, of which only 50% are then able to find a job. Meanwhile, 40% of employers can’t find enough entry-level workers, despite 1 million entry level vacancies.

These dysmal figures are driven by broken discovery process, with students unable to choose betwee 2,300+ colleges, and with limited knowledge of what industry is looking to hire from.

Information asymmetry is the key specific problem we are solving.

Why our solution will solve the problem:

Higher education attainment = higher salary (25-150% bump for higher ed grads vs high school grads) and higher employement rates

Source: ADB

Choice + Information = Better Decision

Undecided about future studies: from 52% to 2%

Understanding about how to get a scholarship as a low income student: from 8% to 100%

Ability to explain employment pathway for preferred career: from 30% to 100%

Source: Edukasyon.ph surveys of pre and post usage of our platform

Need system integrators responsible for taking a high-level view of the entire heterogeneous and fragmented education-to-employment system.

Source: McKinsey, Education to Employment: designing a system that works

Who recommended you to Solve - or - how did you find Solve?

Manila ImpactHub

Step 3

Step 4

The technologies we employ:

Consumer-facing software (mobile applications, cloud services)
Digital systems (machine learning, control systems, big data)

Why our solution is unique:

Edukasyon.ph is the first to truly implement:

Full education to employment journey: from the questions a 15 year old asks, to applying to senior high school at 16, then to college at 18, understanding what career paths are enabled, and finding a job
Address affordability issue: listing public schools, short courses, and scholarships, and adding in Q4 2017 online education and student loans
In-depth multi-stakeholder approach: we have brought together 6 government ministries historically have refused to work together, two duelling telecom players, 200 colleges (in competition), and 40 more corporations and foundations that rarely collaborate.

Why our solution is human-centered:

a) Origins: our entire website is focused on the student's journey, with UI / UX driven by interviewing more than 20,000 students in 2014 & 2015 before launching in 2016.

c) Relatability: we use technology to empower the voices of existing professionals (interviewed in our career section), guidance counselors, and soon college students to share their human story. We don't believe you can, or should, fully automate education & career guidance.

d) Success tracking: we measure success through each individual journey that is carefully recorded on the website, which will eventually drive our data scientist to further improve automated assistance

How people will access our solution:

Online:

Edukasyon.ph is free to all students, parents, and teachers. It's mobile friendly (60% of our traffic is mobile), and comes in no-data required version through our partnership with Facebook. We are further improving affordability by partnering with internet cafes who are donating 30 minutes access cards for exclusive use of our site.

Offline:

We are organising 100+ city-wide school fairs a year, free to attend, sponsored by corporates and organised with government, to replicate the website in person (human touch + ensures even students with zero IT access get the exposure to make informed choices).

Technology-Readiness Level:

9 (Commercial)

Our website

https://edukasyon.ph/

Step 5

Our organization:

For-Profit

Where we are located:

Philippines

How we will sustain our team financially:

Our sustainability is fuelled by a clear business model – the marketplace.

Schools are paying a monthly subscription fee to be on the platform, and eventually an application processing fee will be introduced later in 2017. We are refusing offers to be paid commissions for successful applicants, as this will create perverse incentives for us to push students to the schools paying the highest commission. Instead, with our model we are encouraged to have students apply to as many schools as possible.

Students will not be charged for search & apply, but premium services such as private guidance counselling will be added to the platform, further increasing transaction liquidity and repeat visits.

This strategy is effective – our revenue in 2017 will be ~12x our 2016 revenue, our cost of acquisition is falling down and we are increasing our customer lifetime value, leading to improving unit economics.

The factors limiting our success:

Edukasyon.ph is limited to the following factors that are improving but at a fairly slow rate:

Internet access: may be slow, expensive for students, inaccesible
Nature of schools to adapt: to move admissions online, to improve their offering while tailoring to employer needs
Last mile coverage: can it ever be profitable to reach the lowest income quartile, and if not, how to convince foundations/ governments / corporates to fill that gap?

How long we have been working on our solution:

3 years

How long it will take to develop a pilot:

We have already developed a pilot.

How long it will take to scale beyond our pilot:

We have already scaled beyond pilot.

Our expected annual budget:

700000

How much of our budget we've secured to date:

500000

Our annual report

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bx_MNWZYSJfMV3JEaUpFdlV1c2M?usp=sharing

Our promotional video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isPv7svXkXk

Our promotional materials:

https://www.facebook.com/edukasyonph/

https://twitter.com/edukasyonphl?lang=en

https://www.instagram.com/edukasyonph/

Step 6