Chatbot-enabled skills development

Millions of people are disconnected from opportunities, information, and services that would enable them to make critical life decisions.  Many organizations have information and skills training programs that can help, however, traditional methods of training and information delivery as well as a apps or tablet-based channels are often too expensive for organizations to offer regularly, adapt to changes, and scale to reach those in need. Most information is too complex for many low-income people who have low literacy levels. Arifu digitizes training content from trusted organizations and offers it to the low-income and rural populations through a two-way interactive Short Code Messaging (SMS) system for free.  The Arifu platform can be accessed anywhere globally provided there is a mobile network operator.  Arifu's learning content is also available on smartphone channels such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram and WhatsApp, making it available globally to young people who are more tech savvy.

Youth unemployment is one of the greatest challenges inhibiting economic growth, stability and broad-based prosperity across Africa, Kenya included. Labor productivity has stagnated since 2006 and employment rates are particularly low among young Kenyan women, driven mostly by lower labor force participation.

There is need to support young people, especially women, to work as self-employed and in micro and small enterprises. According to the 2014 Kenya Skills toward Employment and Productivity (STEP) Survey, only 37 percent of women aged 20 to 24 years work in urban Kenya, compared to 60 percent of men. Youth in Kenya already suffer from various constraints such as start-up financing for young entrepreneurs, managerial and entrepreneurial skills, and relevant experience. As a result, almost 80 percent of those employed and aged between 15 and 24 years have an informal job, against 70 percent or lower for the rest of the population. The Kenya Vision 2030 amplifies the problem of youth unemployment and specifically highlights the need to develop their skills for self-employment. Arifu proposes to address youth unemployment with digital skills training enabling them to create new businesses and enhance existing ones.

Arifu is a mobile learning solution that provides both an education technology platform and a content digitization service. The Arifu chatbot - with its basic-phone compatibility and content marketplace - enables personalized learning services that make learning free and relevant while generating valuable insights and analytics for partners. This is made possible through its B2B business approach which sees partners paying for content digitization, platform access, and delivery through SMS.  Arifu uses a human-centered approach to design content ensuring that learners' situations and contexts are taken into account delivered through a two-way Short Code Messaging (SMS) interactive learning approach which increases engagement with content driving positive behavior change and enables low-income people to access learning using a simple feature phone.

Digital learning content is delivered by partnering with Mobile Network Providers (MNOs) in given geographies.  Learning can also be accessed through smartphone channels via Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and WhatsApp.   Arifu’s learning is highly replicable and can be deployed in any geography through minimal adaptation to contextualize it to learners' circumstances and contexts.  Such include language, social makeup of communities, the best learning approach is determined by Arifu research team, products to be offered, and the contacts of such product providers.  

The Arifu mobile learning solution targets the low-income, low-skilled rural dwellers especially in the agricultural sector, characterized by unemployed youth and women between the ages of 18-35 years.  It also targets existing micro enterprises dubbed “Mom & Pop” shops which are also called Dukas in Kenya.  These are targeted in order to enable owners to develop skills that can contribute to making their businesses competitive. Before developing training content Arifu's research, impact and learning teams visit them to collect data through interviews, observation and focus group discussions to understand their learning needs, their contexts in terms of business opportunities and the most suitable learning approach.  Arifu aims to give them financial literacy and entrepreneurship skills as well as digital marketing skills to enable them improve existing business competitiveness and to create new businesses.

As the youth are unemployed, by gaining financial and entrepreneurship skills they will be able to access credit either through their own informal groups or from financial institutions to help them start micro, small and medium enterprises.

The overall outcome of Arifu's solution is to create employment, improve household incomes and overall improvement of communities and Kenya's economy.

Arifu is targeting micro, small and medium enterprises with skills that will enable them improve existing businesses by making them competitive, and create new ones.  Through digital platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook Messenger, youth with smartphones will be able to access resources and networks opening channels for marketing opportunities and financial credit access.  Access to resources and networks will help businesses to attract larger markets, increase their incomes and create new employment in the communities and ultimately increase the overall livelihoods of people and contribute to the country's economic growth.

Arifu has many competitors in the countries where we work.   They include, FarmDrive, Ishamba, Eneza, Juntos, eSoko, WeFarm, Dimagi, Precision Agriculture Development, Digicow, Viamo, Tulaa, Jumo World, Farmerline, Ujuzi Kilimo, M-Shamba, Sibesonke.

Arifu is fueling the future of digital learning through innovation in behavioral science, personalization, and predictive analytics.

Behavioral Science: Arifu has been a pioneering innovator in the application of behavioral science to mobile learning since 2013 beginning. From in-field qualitative surveying to live AB-tests, our team is continuously experimenting with content framing and incentives that leverage known behavioral biases to deliver a more effective product experience that improves learning outcomes.

Personalization: Static, one-size-fits-all content can be effective, but the true potential of digital learning is the ability for AI-based systems to understand who an individual learner is and what they want to achieve in order to respond with personalized learning journeys that place them on the best path to achieving their goals. Arifu is pioneering personalization to unlock major gains in learning and precision agriculture for smallholder farmers to improve their yield, income, and financial health. Predictive 

Analytics: When a learner chats with Arifu, they share information about who they are, what they know and are learning, and what they need. Arifu help partners mine this data through a growing number of predictive data products such as Skills Score, Deep User Profile bundle, Predictive Demographics.

Arifu is a digital mobile technology service which provides an interacting learning conversational AI platform which uses SMS, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and WhatsApp. Arifu’s AI-based system enables us to understand who an individual learner is and what they want to achieve in order to respond with personalized learning journeys that place them on the best path to achieving their goals. Delivered through a conversational agent with hard-to-reach audiences, innovation in personalization involve tactical investments in both adaptive learning and natural language processing.

Being a personalized service, Arifu is not a push messaging system but rather invites individuals to learn by inviting them to content and only those who accept to continue learning with Arifu, can take the learning journey.  We believe that people should enjoy learning and not be coerced to learn.  When a learner accesses the Arifu menu on their phone they can select what topic they wish to build skills in.  Because Arifu has a marketplace of different learning topics, a learner can benefit from other topics on the platform without having to ask for access.

Arifu partners with mobile network operators in the country to enable learners to access learning easily through any mobile phone network.

Arifu has been used in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia by learners in the following sectors: Agriculture, Financial, Humanitarian, Business and Entrepreneurship and most recently in Health.  Testimonies from Arifu power learners (those who have attained course certification) indicates that farmers have recorded 3-4 times increase in production. They confirm having improved their livelihoods through higher returns on their farms and sale of produce. A key catalyst in increased production has been the ability to secure credit from financial institutions. This is particularly so in the case of Equity and KCB learners who have a bundled financial literacy and good agricultural practices learning opportunity. 55% of Arifu learners reported increase per acre of up to Kes 18,700 following learning on good agricultural practices. In the financial sector Arifu learners repayed loans 5.5 days faster than non-Arifu learners, maintained larger account balances by $2, requested larger loans by $0.50 and recorded 0.6 more account transactions.

Arifu is also part of RCTs on our DigiFarm and Business Women Connect partnerships and have two new RCTs rolling out with Harvard and World Bank in Kenya.

Additional evidence to confirm that this innovation works is that partners such as Mercy Corps, Heifer International, Kenya Commercial Bank, Google.org,  and Equity Group continue to partner with Arifu to reach their customers and farmers in countries where we work. 

THEORY OF CHANGE

Arifu has reached 1.2 million learners in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia. In one year's time Arifu hopes to 500,000 more learners with information and skills.  This is based on the fact that with Covid-19 Arifu created new content which some of our partners would like to disseminate to a large population in Kenya.  In five years Arifu hopes to have reached 5 million people.  Those impacted directly and indirectly will be 1 million and 2 million people respectively.

Arifu is currently in 5 countries in Africa.  In five years Arifu anticipates to reach a revenue target of $12.5 million and expansion to 6 more countries in Africa.  Arifu recognizes that some the learners are not very literate.  Arifu's goal is to innovate towards IVR to ensure that we are reaching the most disadvantaged populations who are unable to read or write but can listen to Arifu's training through IVR.  Currently Arifu has to request learners to self-report their data with regard to demographics.  Individuals do not like to disclose such information as they feel it is an invasion of their personal life.  Arifu is working towards developing Natural Language Processing capabilities.  Such an innovation will enable Arifu to disaggreggate learner data by age, education levels, etc. thus better targeting learners with content.

Arifu is developing the "do it yourself"  otherwise known as Turnkey innovation which will enable individuals, especially youth, develop their own content which will benefit their businesses but which will also  enable them to license or sell their content to others.

Barriers that are precluding us from achieving some of goals include:

1. Legal aspects of launching services in some countries.  Linking to different mobile network operators in each country is an expensive and bureaucratic affair.  Some countries have stringent regulations that prohibate quick launch of services, including high cost of doing business.

2. Arifu has to offer content in different languages understood by local populations.  Sometimes it is not easy to get individuals who can translate language in a way that the population understands it.  The problem is also one of low literacy levels in certain rural areas of Africa.

3. In-balance in mobile diffusion in Africa.  Some countries, such as Kenya, have high mobile penetration.  Currently almost 98% of the Kenyan population has access to a phone.  This is not the same case as other countries where we would like to work, especially in some of the West African countries.

4. Expensive to measure impact.  While Arifu has an on-going RCT, it has been a very expensive undertaking and we have relied upon donor funding to get that component of research and impact going.

How we plan to overcome the barriers above:

1. Arifu has been in communication and is at an advanced stage of discussions with Africa's Talking who want to scale their business across Africa in order to plan a role of Integrating all the MNOs.  This will result in a situation where Arifu will not longer need to integrate with individual MNOs per country but will rather rely on AT to facilitate direct integration.

2. One of Arifu's business goals is to integrate Natural Language Processing within the platform and to develop IVR to target the low literate population.  Such innovations will enable Arifu capture different languages and diverse learner demographics and be able to target individuals with low literacy levels in a cheaper manner as less translation will be required.

3. Arifu has started collaborating with GSMA and we hope that through such a collaboration we might be able to influence GSMA to expand its mobile coverage and partnerships in more African countries.

5. Arifu continues to apply for grants for its research and impact program.  

Not applicable.

Arifu has a multi-cultural team of 46 full time staff working in the based at the headquarters in Nairobi, in San Francisco and India, which provides the required expertise in diverse fields to ensure effective delivery of projects.  Each of the key functions outlined below is led by an experienced and highly competent individual.

Business Development, Project Management, Research & Impact, Learning & Content Development, Technology Engineering & Data, Quality Assurance, Operations and Talent.

Arifu has no part-time staff but has 3 consultants.

Arifu's contractors include MNOs and Cloud-based services. 

The innovation is led by a leadership team that is diverse and high qualified as portrayed below.

Craig Heintzman, Founder and CEO

Craig has over 10 years of experience working in ICT4D, M4D, and SME Development in Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe. He previously worked at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the World Wide Web Foundation. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Philosophy from Queen’s University. 

Marisa Conway, Chief Learning Officer

Marisa has 12 years of experience as an educator in Mali, Guinea, Japan and the US. She has a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology. She earned a Master in Education at Harvard University. Marisa has been working with Arifu for 2 years as the CLO designing and creating impactful content.

Yvonne Good, Chief Operations Officer

Yvonne has over 15 years of experience in operational management. Yvonne holds a Global Executive Master of Business Administration (GeMBA) from USIU, a Bachelor of Commerce degree (Finance), a Certified Public Accountant (CPA -K) certification and a Diploma in Information Management Systems (IMIS).

Karthi Keyan Nagaiyan, Chief Technology Officer

Karthi has over two decades of experience as a senior technical architect and data scientist. Prior to Arifu, Karthi was the Co-Founder, CTO & Chief Data Scientist at Kognetics, an Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Graph company. Karthi received his MS in Operations Research at the University of Delaware, and Bachelors’ Degree in Production Engineering from PSG Tech.

Examples include:

a. World Bank One Million Farmer Platform: This is an initiative that aims to reach farmers with diverse services through digital technology. Arifu is offering farmers in 7 counties in Kenya business and entrepreneurship training, Good Agricultural Practices in Drought Resistant Potato and Poultry production training.

b. Equity Bank: Arifu digitized their financial products for small scale businesses, including farmers, offered financial literacy and entrepreneurship skills training in Kenya.

c. Heifer International: Arifu digitized their poultry and livestock training and delivered it to diverse population in Kenya and Tanzania.  This content has been licensed to diverse partners thus reaching many farmers interested in livestock and poultry business, especially the youth.

d. Google.org: to reach 100,000 farmers in Kenya with diverse training for improved agricultural production and digital business development.  This grant is also assisting Arifu in conducting research aimed at looking at different learning approaches and resultant impact.

Our revenue model is Business to Business (B2B) where we sell the use of our Arifu Platform and Content Design Services to large firms and NGOs in order to grow while ensuring content is free and accessible to learners. The specific revenue streams include:

a) Partner services: fee-for-service for content digitization and evaluation. 

b) SMS Markup: 20%-50% markup applied to all outgoing SMS. With our partners we agree on the number of messages and the number of beneficiaries we intend to reach and we charge the partner for the delivery of the trainings to beneficiaries.  Each beneficiary is expected to consume, on average, 24 messages per year.

c) Platform subscriptions: Our clients pay to use the Arifu Platform. This is a typical software subscription fee to deliver content and access basic analytics. The amount paid is for the number of learners within a 12 month period that the client desires to engage with their content.

d) Advertising: Arifu charges a messaging premium to clients who wish to have their product or brand name included in messages sent to learners either through push or pull messaging.

e) Content licensing: Arifu offers a 50% revenue share with content owners who want to monetize their content by licensing distribution rights to other partners on the Arifu Platform.

f) Premium data products: Arifu offers demographic, lead generation, location data and deep user profiling. Coming soon are propensity scores, credit scores, skills score and consumer insights.

Currently Arifu is raising funds through different revenue channels.  One is grants for building up the innovation and a content marketplace and the other is working with partners who pay to digitize their own in-person training content to be licensed to other businesses.  For sustainability and scalability Arifu will capitalize on the following:

1. Make content licensable and available: Arifu is enabling the licensing of content to and between partners, opening up high-margin, recurring revenue as content assets are licensed and re-licensed on a revenue-share basis.  This has been beneficial to diverse partners, multinationals, national institutions such as agricultural research institutions, banks, etc. who are able to pay for initial digitization of trusted content.

2. Do it Yourself Content Development: Arifu will be launching its new product, "Turnkey" in 2020-2021 which will enable partners, especially youth entrepreneurs, to develop their own content. All the tools and instructions will be available online for own content production. This is aimed at increasing the volume of licensable content so learners and partners join the Arifu team as content producers.  This approach will create sustainability as Arifu will have a lot of content on the marketplace, will build capacity of young people and create employment.

Once Arifu's marketplace is fully built up, Arifu will no longer depend on grants.

Arifu’s solution still needs further tech-based support in order to refine it and offer it in the market in a scalable and sustainable manner.  The real change will happen once our AI capability, NLP and IVR is fully refined and once the solution becomes self-serving.  The population that Arifu is seeking to serve is the bottom of the paramid which has limited capacity in terms of technology.  This population is also seeking to improve their livelihood and as such the enhancement of technology while focusing on life-changing skills and information will continue to be Arifu’s focus. 

Areas Arifu would like support include:

1. Arifu would like to tap into MIT’s Tech support to facilitate rapid development of the AI, Natural Language Processing and IVR capabilities.

2. Arifu would also like to tap into expertise of the SOLVE community to assist in the completion of the “Turnkey” do-it-yourself content development capability as this will go a long way in addressing the needs of the target groups.

3. Arifu is seeking to raise funds through equity and grants in order to increase its content on the open marketplace so that the product can reach scale in terms of geographic reach and content diversity.

4.  Research will continue to be a key component of Arifu's focus.  Therefore, support towards research is very critical.  Given that research, especially RCT is expensive, Arifu would like to seek grant support for this component of the solution.

Arifu's partnership goals are as follows:

1. Facilitate rapid development of the AI capabilities, including natural processing. Assist in the completion of the “Turnkey” do-it-yourself content development capability and IVR as these will go a long way in addressing the needs of the target groups.

2. Arifu is seeking to raise funds through equity and grants in order to increase its content on the open marketplace so that the product can reach scale in terms of geographic reach and content diversity.

3.  Monitoring, evaluation and impact research will continue to be a key component of Arifu's focus.  Therefore, support towards research is very critical.  Given that research, especially RCT is expensive, Arifu would like to seek grant support for this component of the solution.

1. Arifu would like to tap into MIT’s Tech support for strategic advice and mentorship.

2. Arifu would also like to tap into a network of the SOLVE community through networking event in Washington whenever travel becomes feasible.

3. Arifu would like to expand its activities in the Humanitarian space in order to reach more refugees and would therefore like to access support through the Andan Prize.

4. Arifu's vision to reach more unemployed youth to gain business skills in order to build competitive business is critical, especially in these times of Covid-19 when many youths have lost jobs due to the current economic situation in Kenya and Africa in general.  We would welcome a longer term partnership with GM, including the prize.

Arifu partnered with UNCDF to offer financial literacy to refugees in Nyarugusu Camp in Tanzania and good agricultural practices to host communities in the same region.  Arifu used a Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) approach to train refugees on forming and joining groups and how to grow financial shares.

Arifu continues to target refugees and host communities to provide solutions that enable refugees to learn skills needed to create and improve their livelihoods, improve financial knowledge of savings and borrowing practices, and learn how to access and use digital financial services that can help them contribute to the local economies in their countries and create a sustainable future. With the acquired skills and experiences they can also better prepare for their eventual return to their home countries or be able to build a new life in their country of resettlement.

The targeted groups include: a) new arrivals who are exposed to training on cash and voucher assistance (CVAs) mobile delivery; b) intermediate residents, specifically women who have been in the camps for some time and have created informal groups will receive training in benefits of formal groups (SACCOs; and c) active residents who participate in employment and trade within and outside the camp will receive financial and business management training. Host communities who interact and sell products to the refugee community will also learn good cropping and agronomic practices to enable them improve their farm productivity.

In 2018 Arifu partnered with Equity Group, CGAP, Mercy Corps in the provision of digital training in rural Kenya. Arifu availed Interactive learning platform through the Bank’s mobile application delivering Financial Education, Entrepreneurship Training, and interactive learning on six of the Bank’s financial products to 200,000 user in Kenya, most of whom were youth and farmers.  This training was offered to any Equitel mobile network user in the 47 Kenyan counties.

In 2018-2019 Arifu partnered with Mastercard and Uniliver to digitize financial and entrepreneurship training for merchants (Duka owners) in Kenya and Nigeria.  This training targets learners in diverse languages in both countries and was delivered on SMS and Facebook Messenger.

Arifu is seeking to expand reach to youth to create employment and enable them to learn financial and entrepreneurship skills that can assist them to start their own businesses and improve the competitiveness of existing ones.