ShortKode

We are committed to increasing maths & literacy skills previously lacking in 443 million children in Africa & Asia by reducing costs of continuous teacher development & teacher staff sourcing through the use of technology. ShortKode makes recruitment costs 80% cheaper and reduces hiring intervals to minutes instead of months through predictive algorithms & instant matching features. Through its website, appropriate pedagogy courses are grouped as both free and affordable plans which allow teachers to train themselves through personalized micro learning in subject specialization, impart basic skills to children using different techniques during employment and before getting hired. 

With 850 million mobile sim connections in Sub-Saharan Africa to rise to 1 billion by 2024 and 1 billion mobile connections in South Asia, ShortKode plans to support SMS & Call facilitated instruction backed by field tests run in 2020, thereby promoting inclusion through locally adapted foreign based pedagogy. 

According to 200+ schools & teachers we interviewed across 5 Nigerian states, UNESCO'S Institute of Statistics, Save The Children, IICBA, India's NEP & SACMEQ; 56% of all children globally won't be able to attain basic numeracy & literacy levels by primary education age, with 61% of adolescents unable to achieve minimum proficiency levels when completing lower secondary school. As 443 million children and adolescents in Sub-Saharan, Central & Southern Asia are not achieving minimum proficiency levels, 23 million+ trained teachers are needed in these 1.5 million+ schools. About 100 countries don't assess learning outcomes, losing $0.5bn annually thus posing a threat to the future of entire generations. 

Now sourcing qualified teachers prove costly and hiring timelines reach 4 months in Sub-Saharan Africa, inversely in Southern Asia i.e India, there's a surplus of teachers in small public schools, still widely used teacher training models prove costly ($244/₦100,000+ to $1,000s) while being ineffective and unfeasible at scale, learning outcomes have dropped significantly in the last decade.

ShortKode is a recruitment platform that improves student basic skills through low cost access to quality teaching aids and trained teachers for schools. 

Schools and teachers are able to post vacancies and apply for teaching jobs within 5 minutes through a few taps and/or 1 phone call whereby demand for candidates are high and candidate sourcing prices are 80% cheaper than industry standard. 

Graduates, Aspiring K12 Teachers, Untrained K-12 teachers can access curated pedagogical courses tailored to their learning strengths via SMS and/or website where they learn before getting hired and instructional content eg. Lesson plans, foreign-local curriculum adaptations, class surveys are made accessible during employment to improve their capacity to impart the right basic skills to students in class. 

ShortKode uses a simplified & unified website to ensure job matching, teacher courses, proficiency assessments can work under low bandwidth (feature phones, 2G, SMS, Calls) conditions with quick user responsiveness, continuous micro learning and class surveys are available via SMS and timed calls for teachers in low resource settings. 

We target rural to semi urban K12 schools which have at least 10 pupils/students, graduates aged 25 above looking to become a teacher, aspiring teachers, novice teachers (0-2 years experience) and practicing teachers (2.5-6+ years experience). These make up 70% of Africa's 400,000+ schools, 60% of India's 1,400,000 schools. 

With varying problems ranging from long hiring intervals, lack of access to teaching staff for hire, low literacy & maths competency student penetration, low ICT skill penetration among students, understaffed schools, poor infrastructure, rigid curriculums & theory centered teaching methods, more than 1.1 million schools mainly in rural & semi urban areas in these regions struggle to cope with these realities, whereas a wide sample of these K12 schools have profit margins of less than 10%. ShortKode helps improve learning outcomes at scale by providing job search & matching services to schools hiring & job seeking teachers through calls, text, and a low bandwidth website which connects otherwise hard to find aspiring teachers to employing schools thus facilitating sustainable jobs at below market rate costs. ShortKode also improves learning outcomes for millions of classes through locally adapting foreign curriculums i.e (Singaporean numeracy methodologies now adapted to work in Nigerian, Kenyan and Indian class settings) that specialize in increasing literacy & numeracy outcomes by providing access to new techniques for teaching, low cost instructional materials for school class distribution, ranking teachers per location on our platform based on the performance of their classes in set tests & exams. These interventions allow teachers registered on our platform to be featured & showcased to parents looking for the right schools for their children, who in turn can employ them as private tutors which increases their earnings due to part time jobs. An availability of teaching resources, peer to peer review of classroom activities and problems through ShortKode's platform and agents give teachers a renewed sense of belonging, increasing teacher job satisfaction, reducing difficulties in carrying out work duties, reducing teacher attrition which ultimately attracts newer younger aged entrants into the field as not only a way to escape poverty, but a place of community, service to the country and career development. 

We engage teachers and school admins directly online and through partners, offline channels such as education focused Facebook groups, direct chats & education focused WhatsApp groups, at school premises, through calls & text messages where necessary. So far we've interviewed more than 100 schools and 100 teachers from 5 different Nigerian states to improve our thesis. We also noticed through research that educational standards and problems between Sub-Saharan Africa and India are very similar although with different cultural outlooks (Rural India, 65% of India's K-12 schools). 

With 2030 jobs predicted to be far different from those of 2020, ShortKode plans to connect students who are part of the classes in which teachers use its technology to teach basic skills, to vocaional and formal job training centers to further prepare these students for the future of work. By working directly with TVET institutions, SMMEs and governing institutions ShortKode creates an "employable" workforce that can engage in early career exploration through ShortKode's partner programs. This reduces unemployment rates, improves student discipline, organizes the host nation's workforce and greatly enhances government organized job training programs.

Teacher pedagogy in developing countries has stagnated. Due to costly rigid training models ($244-$1,000s) with school's gross profit margins less than 10%, initial teacher education followed the form of short expensive workshops which proved ineffective due to irregularities and were less subject matter specific while not accounting for the challenges & instructional goals the host school is facing. ShortKode helps teachers learn new techniques in low resource settings and adapt their pedagogy for higher student attainment rates through its in-house expert team and machine learning algorithms which customize foreign curriculums to local settings helping teachers perform better in class.

In January 2021 to Mar 2021,we carried out product tests using a manual mvp to test out demand, we worked with 17 schools, 23 teacher trainers and 117 teachers present in rural areas of Lagos, Ogun, Ekiti, Abuja, Ilorin to discover what was lacking in our product, extra needs not addressed (a need for a more flexible, cheaper, asynchronous training platform for existing undertrained and/or underperforming staff. 

Unlike conventional approaches that take 4 months to place teaching jobs, rely on poorly equipped government training institutions, high hiring & teacher training costs which deter majority of K12 school operations (70% of these schools have <10% gross profit margins) in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia from attaining high numeracy & literacy levels required by students to work in the 2030 job market. 

With ShortKode undertrained teachers, graduates with unnoticed talent but little to no pedagogical knowledge to impact students, novices looking for a job, can undergo free and paid training courses tailored as bite sized learning plans. Users are able to track the learning progress through repeated reminders, take assessments and the algorithm determines their attainment level before they are given a go ahead by the system to teach real students. 

ShortKode also uses machine learning to recommend students who have attained certain numeracy and literacy levels to vocational training institutions due to their proficiency rate. As illitrates which make up more than half of the student and youth population are usually ignored, take more resources to upskill which exclude majority of them from training programs. ShortKode's interventions that cost <$10 per teacher per quarter allow governments to maximize spending on inclusive job training programs as more literates are added based on ShortKode's recommendations, this allows students to be introduced to the world of work earlier speeding up GDP growth and reduces crime rates as the student is empowered should the case be that the student can't further his/her education. 

Currently we serve 30+ K12 schools and 117+ teachers in rural & urban areas. In one year we plan to serve 700+ paying K12 schools and 9,000+ paying teachers and in 5 years we plan to reach 31,500 paying K12 schools and 405,000 K12 paying teachers. These are estimates as paying users represent 40%-50% of total users on platform due to our freemium approach to teacher training content.

SDG goals 1 (No Poverty) Indicator 1.21: No of unemployed graduates trained for teaching jobs through free public private partnerships per month. SDG goals 4 (Quality Education) Indicator 4.1.1: percentage basic skills attainment rare for students per 10 to 100 classes in primary and lower secondary schools per quarter. 4.6.1: regional education quality rating per school based proficiency in maths & literacy per quarter. 4.7.1: percentage of 21st century skills embedded in revised curriculum, teacher training courses and in skills attainment class surveys in partnership with public & private sector formal & informal training bodies every 6 months. 4.c.1: No of inservice teachers using ShortKode's free & paid hybrid platform courses to improve their effectiveness, qualifications & success rate per month. SDG goals 8 (Decent work & Economic growth) Indicators 8.6.1: percentage of unemployed graduates per state operating in using ShortKode to improve literacy skills or seek employment per month. 8.b.1: No of effective initiatives in partnership with governments to train now literate users in formal & informal jobs for financial independence & increased economic growth.

4 (full time staff), 7 (part time staff). 

Our team consists of Prosper Ukachi: CEO, Leads sales and fundraising. Core Founding Team: Kayode: App Development, Product Advisor, Adegbite, Elijah: Product Analyst & Teacher, Samson, Cletus: CTO, Managing Product Development, Inijah Quadri: Product Analyst & Teacher. Our management includes four departments (IT, Customer relations, content & research, marketing) of which are under C-Level management. Individually we have founded profitable businesses at 18, won hackathons, built apps for Getajobng, Access Bank, ran 500+ software projects, held leadership positions and lectured in Polythechnics, built a social product marketplace, an automatic task that migrated millions of data to a new database for site revamping. Our Team as a whole has worked in FITC, Royal BBS, Globant, The Venture Garden Group and currently own a school. 

Together we have been recognized by Hack Africa, African Innovation Week 2020, StartupCircles.ai, EUvsVirus EIC Launchathon, The Startup Club, Roundtrip Afrika Fellowship and are currently part of Impact Hub. With a combined 30+ years of experience teaching in rural & urban leadership of educational bodies, we have experienced systematic inequalities of educational standards as students, parents & teachers that take place as norms in our nation. We aim to use these experiences to tailor our products to the rural & urban communities we live in. 

We are 12% white, 88% black, 75% male, 25% female.

We are open-minded, ever learning & value integrity. Our core values are Team Work, Passion, Learning, Quality, Diversity, Result Oriented, Integrity. We are open-minded from the onset encouraging diversity (We comprise of whites, blacks, males and females). For ensuring quality of service, team work and getting constant results we tend to set tasks ahead of us with timelines. We internally measure our progress, if we were performing below expectations, up to par with expectations or above expectations, we would like to know why, which will help us improve on it. Passion & Integrity are at the heart of what we do, when we track our work, stand by our words, keeping an open mind to allow constant feedback from customers.

As the world is waking up to a learning crisis, Edtech solutions are on the rise but not at the pace of Fintech solutions in popularity, an irony regarding usability of finance product whereas a form of basic literacy and numeracy skills is needed to own a bank account statement. ShortKode's recruitment platform helps to improve teacher job satisfaction due to affordable immediate support, increases student learning levels due to proven localized foreign curriculums and allows schools to focus on giving top notch services instead of worrying about hiring costs. These benefits are sought after by schools, as ShortKode has gotten from recognition from Impact Hub, EUvsVirus, African Innovation Week 2020 & Alibaba GET Global. We are applying to Solve because other than much needed grant support, we could build better effective impact measurement structures, receive much needed coaching, strategic advice on topics like market penetration, pivoting at scale, tailoring government support programs, running lean at scale and using MIT networks to gain much validated exposure and product development support in the long term. This partnership will help leap our progress, further push our goal to equip millions of children with basic skills needed for future jobs while cementing ShortKode as the world's leading basic skills provider.

Human Capital: Advice when making new hires, improving the quality of the board of directors to conduct partnerships better

Financial: Advice on methods of improving accounting practices, uniform tax returns for different regions of operations. 

Public relations: We currently lack in branding development and would need advice to brand ShortKode appropriately. 

Regulatory Matters: Mentorship support for making partnerships with governing bodies while also keeping GDPR standards. 

Monitoring & Evaluation: Mentorship & partner support from IWER, Giz.de, British Council & AFDBs Joint Youth Employment Initiative, MIT Institute For Work and Employment Research, One World International School Singapore, New Teacher Center Singapore, Research For Better Teaching Singapore, to Create inclusive programs where students & youths are taught literacy and are directly connected to job training platforms thereby reducing high poverty rates, crime rates caused by illiteracy & lack of job skills. MIT Partner support will also help ShortKode monitor progress overtime & evaluate different trail plans. 

Technology: partner support & In-kind services to help iterate product, build out new features through software development & design, partnership with MIT BRL to better design our products to fit customer behaviors, better aesthetics, the ability for illiterate teachers & student to be able to use ShortKode's product easily without difficulty and become literate.

Giz.de (Their support can foster better talks with the Nigerian Federal Ministry Of Budget & National Planning), Common Wealth of Learning (Access to technical schools in Zambia, linking ShortKode's now literate users to job training programs), British Council & AFDBs Joint Youth Employment Initiative (Identify gifted children trough ShortKode's network of schools and connect them to trainers should they option for informal jobs), MIT Institute For Work and Employment Research (ShortKode is helping children prepare for the future of work, with help from IWER, we can tailor teacher curriculums & courses with practices to better prepare children for future jobs), One World International School Singapore, New Teacher Center Singapore, Research For Better Teaching Singapore (Sending personnel to learn from these organizations/incorporating learning's into locally adapted teacher capacity courses/employing or partnering with teachers who possess knowledge & skills in improving basic numeracy and literacy skills using Singaporean curriculum practices. This will help ShortKode with machine learning, replicate successful math and literacy outcomes for millions of students at scale).

With more than 447 million children across Sub-Saharan Africa & South Asia lacking minimum proficiency levels in math and literacy, an entire generation is not prepared for the future of work. 

ShortKode uses machine learning to improve basic skill outcomes for students and teachers in low resource areas. 

We use machine learning to track learning outcomes of teachers trained remotely via SMS surveys, online tests and data from curriculum course completion. Through teacher training courses which are broken into bite sized videos and SMS messages, ShortKode is able streamline learning, equip novice teachers with internationally acclaimed Singaporean curriculums which are locally tailored to different personal learning strengths. Due to high mobile penetration, ShortKode is able to train thousands of teachers at scale before they are employed, increase teacher earnings, curriculum proficiency and save schools hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars in teacher training costs (Initial Teacher Education & Continuous Professional Training). ShortKode's in house team adapts foreign proven pedagogical techniques to the local settings of users to help improve teacher proficiency faster as the teacher needs to understand the subject and be proficient before he/she can successfully transfer the knowledge to the student. ShortKode will use the AI for Humanity Prize to further test its solution in different scenarios, build improved machine learning algorithms for enhancing teacher capacity at scale and initiate partnerships with job training institutions to supply literate gifted students for early career exploration trainings. 

With more than 447 million children across Sub-Saharan Africa & South Asia lacking minimum proficiency levels in math and literacy, an entire generation is not prepared for the future of work. 

ShortKode uses machine learning to improve basic skill outcomes for students and teachers in low resource areas. 

We use machine learning to track learning outcomes of teachers trained remotely via SMS surveys, online tests and data from curriculum course completion. Through teacher training courses which are broken into bite sized videos and SMS messages, ShortKode is able streamline learning, equip novice teachers with internationally acclaimed Singaporean curriculums which are locally tailored to different personal learning strengths. Due to high mobile penetration, ShortKode is able to train thousands of teachers at scale before they are employed, increase teacher earnings, curriculum proficiency and save schools hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars in teacher training costs (Initial Teacher Education & Continuous Professional Training). ShortKode's in house team adapts foreign proven pedagogical techniques to the local settings of users to help improve teacher proficiency faster as the teacher needs to understand the subject and be proficient before he/she can successfully transfer the knowledge to the student. ShortKode will use the AI for Humanity Prize to further test its solution in different scenarios, build improved machine learning algorithms for enhancing teacher capacity at scale and initiate partnerships with job training institutions to supply literate gifted students for early career exploration trainings. 

With more than 447 million children across Sub-Saharan Africa & South Asia lacking minimum proficiency levels in math and literacy, an entire generation is not prepared for the future of work. 

ShortKode uses machine learning to improve basic skill outcomes for students and teachers in low resource areas. 

We use machine learning to track learning outcomes of teachers trained remotely via SMS surveys, online tests and data from curriculum course completion. Through teacher training courses which are broken into bite sized videos and SMS messages, ShortKode is able streamline learning, equip novice teachers with internationally acclaimed Singaporean curriculums which are locally tailored to different personal learning strengths. Due to high mobile penetration, ShortKode is able to train thousands of teachers at scale before they are employed, increase teacher earnings, curriculum proficiency and save schools hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars in teacher training costs (Initial Teacher Education & Continuous Professional Training). ShortKode's in house team adapts foreign proven pedagogical techniques to the local settings of users to help improve teacher proficiency faster as the teacher needs to understand the subject and be proficient before he/she can successfully transfer the knowledge to the student. ShortKode will use the GSR Prize to further test its solution in different scenarios, build improved machine learning algorithms for enhancing teacher capacity at scale and initiate partnerships with job training institutions to supply literate gifted students for early career exploration trainings.