BrainShare

Over 30% of girls in Uganda drop out of school and others miss school because they lack sanitary pads or basic knowledge of dealing with menstruation (https://www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1328198/-girls-leaving-school-lack-sanitary-pads). This is just one of the many reasons why girls have unequal access to quality education as compared to male counterparts. As BrainShare, our award-winning e-learning and skills development platform offers learners quality learning content e.g notes, pastpapers, eBooks and video lessons. All the content is localised and is sourced from top teachers that partner with us. We also offer skills development training to young women/girls in different areas such as menstrual hygiene (e.g training on how to make sanitary pads from locally available raw materials) as well as entrepreneurship. If our solution is scaled globally, we shall help keep many girls in school as well as empower them with skills in entrepreneurship and life skills. BrainShare works both online and offline.

Today, 132 million girls are out of school including 52 million in sub-saharan Africa alone. This is due in part to the fact that girls have unequal access to quality education compared to their male counterparts. This is attributed to different factors which include though may not be limited to effects of menstruation, early marriages etc that prevent them from accessing quality education. 

"Menstruation in many societies is discussed in hushed tones. Unfortunately, the ripple effect is that young girls are forced to drop out of school...New Vision Reporter"

40% of girls in Uganda are married before their 18th birthday and one in 10 is married before the age of 15. 

According to UNICEF, Uganda has the 16th highest prevalence rate of child marriage in the world and the tenth highest absolute number of child brides globally – 787,000.

Customary marriages or informal marriages, where a girl lives with an older man, are more common than registered civil or religious marriages.

11% of currently married 15-19 year old girls are married to men who have more than one wife.

A 2017 World Bank study shows that ending child marriage in Uganda could generate USD514 million in earnings and productivity.

Our solution is an e-learning and skills development platform that connects learners (especially marginalised girls/ladies) to quality academic content like class notes, pastpapers, eBooks, video lessons as well as connecting the learners to teachers remotely via USSD,IVR and SMS. On top of the teachers, the platform also provides content from mentors whose main purpose is to inspire girls to stay in school and advance their education.

Our skills development arm takes into account girls and young women in both the formal and informal learning sectors. We partner with experts at different levels to create content e.g locally made training videos as well as other training collateral that can be used for training purposes. All this content is made available on our e-learning platform as well as also loaded on a portable flash disc or CD for offline consumption. In an event that a girl/young woman would like to ask a direct question to one of the teachers, trainers or mentors, they can do so by calling our toll-free customer care line and we connect them or use our USSD, IVR and SMS channels.

Majority of the girls and young women that we target are rural marginalised ones who are at risk of dropping out of school or can not access education for various reasons as earlier discussed. These could be girls or young women in refugee settlements or in the host communities. We have, with support of some NGOs engaged girls and young women in BidiBidi refugee settlement as well as the host communities in order to understand the challenges that they face further as we also pilot our platform.

The solution will give them access to both academic learning content as well as skills development content to help boost their personal skills as well as learn new entreprenuership skills required to boost their financial well being. 

The fact that many girls are out of school because of unequal learning opportunities as compared to their male counterparts is an opportunity for us to use our technological tools (like our e-learning and skills development platform) to fill this gap. One way is to provide these girls access to learning content or better still train them in skills development. All this can happen online or offline using simple tools like a portable flash disc, CDs, simple feature phones that have USSD, IVR and SMS functionalities. The other extra advantage is our toll-free call centre that is available to all.

Our solution is unique because it revolves alot around localised content (eg content developed by local teachers, mentors and trainers) and is offered in local accents as well as local languages that are known to all.

Also, our solution can be delivered in different mediums like flash discs, CDs, web, IVR, USSD, SMS etc all ensuring an all - round learning experience for all both online and offline.

Our competitors like Khan academy require internet connectivity for one to access their content. Also, their videos are made with a strong accent and are not translated into local languages to suit the local market/consumers (local girls or young women).

Our technology is web, USSD, IVR and SMS. Our content is however made available on flash discs as well as CDs for offline access. For those that have access to the internet, they can use our web portal to access learning content. However, those that may not have access to the internet can use options like USSD, IVR and SMS to help them access content or to connect to teachers, mentors or trainers. 

We also have Flash discs and CDs as an option to store our content especially videos, eBooks etc for communities that may not be able to access the internet or those who may not access computers.

Our toll-free call centres are always open to voice calls, texts (SMS), USSD and IVR inquiries from our users. This way they can be helped by our customer care staff and get routed to the help they need.

USSD, IVR and SMS technology is widely used by consumers of telecom services for services like mobile money or checking airtime balance. We literally converted the same technology to be used in learning and skills development. Allow me to focus alittle on USSD. This technology is effortless and has a predefined menu which guides the user through the process until they get to the content they would like to consume. The content can then be sent to them via SMS upon selection. Below is a demo of our USSD channel that can explain this in more detail:

Here is a demo of USSD in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EnIKUQdh8I

Research findings as indicated in this world bank report show that educating a girl child is one sure way of ending child marriage and teenage pregnancy. We anchor alot on this belief as a motivation to make our contribution to the girl-child education.

We believe that once many a girl child is exposed to the right learning content or better still given mentorship on the advantages of staying in school, we shall have many girls focusing on their education. To the girls that may not be in school, our skills development program will train them skills to help them improve their financial well-being.

In the end, we shall have contributed to a greater nation where the girl child is empowered in education and skills development.

We currently serve 450,000 young girls and women. In one year, we shall be serving 2,000,000 young girls and women. In five years, we will be serving 30 million young girls and women.

Our goal next year is to reach more than 2 million girls and young women. We seek to make further partnerships with NGOs, educational institutions, Teachers, Trainers, Mentors and skilled personnel to help us further our dream of impacting on the girl child.

By next year, we hope to help connect each girl to a mentor who can always encourage her whenever she feels low or feels like giving up. Such mentors will be sourced from the community and they can always schedule some time to offers words of encouragement or better still listen to these girls whenever they have questions to ask.

In five years, we hope to reach out to 30 million girls and young women in disadvantaged communities and ensure they get access to learning content as well as skills development. We hope that the first cohorts from our training programs will also be used as mentors to encourage their peers from other regions and communities to take on the opportunity that BrainShare presents to them. We have firm belief that their words of encouragement and experience as program beneficiaries will encourage more girls to come out and take on the opportunity to enroll into our program and learn.

To achieve all this, we hope to partner with a number of like-minded organisations (eg NGOs), academic institutions, governments etc to ensure the success of the program.

There are a number of barriers to overcome and I will try to highlight the key ones:

1) Financial barriers: We need a big budget to be able to develop local content to suit the academic and skills gap needs of our target beneficiaries. This budget will also support the marketing initiatives.

2) Market barriers: We need more Telecom companies to give us access to their network resources such as USSD/IVR/SMS. Forexample, if we are already integrated to MTN Uganda's USSD/IVR/SMS, it means, if we are to move to Kenya, we shall need Safaricom Kenya to do the same for us. This also means that we shall need local Kenyan teachers, mentors, trainers etc to support in content creation suitable for the Kenyan market. In areas where the content is aligned, we may take Ugandan content and use it in a Kenyan context forexample, Mathematics does not change. Also, for skills development topics like basket making, these may not change though there may be need for a voice over on the videos to give it a Kenyan accent and localise it further.

1) Financial Barrier: We hope to partner with like-minded organisations e.g NGOs that will be willing to cover some budgets/items on the budget. We also intend to raise funding to help us cover this financial gap.

2) Market Barriers: We intend to engage local telecoms e.g Safaricom in Kenya to offer us integration on platforms like USSD, IVR and SMS. We also intend to train local content creators to create more region-relevant content.

7 fulltime staff, 5 part time staff

We have combined experience of 30 years working on technology solutions for development. 60% of the team are very technical with backgrounds in system integrations (USSD, IVR and SMS Gateways) and have been part of or have previously developed related technologies for other organisations. 20% of our staff are former employees of NGOs that have served in refugee settlements before as well as in other disadvantaged communities. 

1) MTN Uganda: It is a local telecom company that is providing USSD, IVR adn SMS services to us.

2) Uganda National Teachers Association: This is the local association of Ugandan teachers that is offering us teachers to create local content for the learners.

3) ACODEV: It is a local NGO that has supporting us find local women mentors as well as local skills development trainers for our skills development program.

Our main product offering is the sell of content. This content can be learning/academic content or can be skills development content. Either way, beneficiaries have to subscribe to the content of their choice. This makes subscription our first business model.

The second business model is the sale of offline content forexample, sale of CDs or flash discs that are loaded with our learning content. These direct sales make our second business model.

Our third model is the B2C model where we offer our content to third party providers who resell the same content to their customers. Case in point is solar companies that distribute solar powered TV sets. These supply these TV sets with our content inbuilt and add our cost as a markup on the TV sales. Usually, these companies sell their TVs on hire purchase and for every installment, they include our fee.

We intend to partner with more B2C companies, expose our content API to as many organisations as possible so that our content can be availed to many more audiences through third party service providers that consume our APIs. This will grow usage as well as revenue since API access will be a premium service that will attract a fee.

We also intend to continuously earn from the standard subscription fees that we charge as well as the direct sales of the content that is sold on flash discs as well as CDs.

We shall also continue sourcing for grants as well as raise capital. 

We would like to be part of Solve's community where we believe we can get more opportunities to learn from other industry experts as well as get expert advice from trusted and well-intended sources. We also hope to get marketing opportunities for our solution through leveraging Solve's digital marketing channels among others.

We also hope to win some of the cash awards offered by Solve and its partners and this would be an opportunity for us to grow our impact.

We would like partners to support us with marketing, media and exposure because this is one way to get us discovered by more beneficiaries out there, potential granters as well as potential investors. We also need refinement in our revenue model as well as support in how to get funding for our initiative.

We would like to partner with MIT faculty because we believe they are experts in academia and hence their guidance and expert advice would help us achieve great success.

Also, we would like to partner with some potential organisations that are equally focused on e-learning and skills development so that we can support each other in different ways.

Since we offer skills development in entrepreneurship skills for refugees as well as their hosts, we believe this is one sure way of advancing economic and financial inclusion of the refugees as well as for their hosts.

We intend to use this prize to boost our skills development efforts by developing more content which will cover more entrepreneurship categories. This would give refugees a wider pool of skills development lessons/tutorials to learn from. 

We too use innovative technology to improve quality of life for women and girls. Through our skills development program, our focus is to ensure that the girls and women can learn entrepreneurship skills which would help them better their lives.

We intend to use this prize to boost our skills development efforts by developing more content which will cover more entrepreneurship categories. This would give girls and women a wider pool of skills development lessons/tutorials to learn from. 

our solution encourages access to learning opportunities for the world’s most vulnerable girls and women, including access to STEM education through our award-winning e-learning platform BrainShare.

We intend to use this prize to develop more learning content for the girls as well as purchase more flash discs and CDs through which we can distribute more of our learning content to more vulnerable girls and offer our learning content to them free of charge. We shall let them know this was as a result of the generous contribution from GM.

Our platform increases literacy rates among adults and advances inclusive economic growth through greater digital literacy. Through our skills development program, we make digital skills development content that supports both young and adult women and learners.

We intend to use this prize to enroll more adults into our skills development program and offer them free access to our training content courtesy of Gulbenkian.

In our roadmap, we plan on using strong data science, artificial intelligence, or machine learning in our services but did not have the budget to get the right experts to support us incorporate these in our technology and workflows.

We intend to use the prize to hire strong data scientists, artificial intelligence and machine learning experts to help us incorporate all these technologies in our services. We also intent to use the funds to pay for licences as well as learning tutorials to help us build an internal team that will be responsible for explicitly working on data science, artificial intelligence and machine language.