FoondaMate

Problem: 

315M high school students in developing countries attend low quality schools, have limited internet access and struggle to afford educational materials such as textbooks and study guides.

Solution: 

These students usually live in households with access to an entry level smartphone and WhatsApp. WhatsApp has over 97% penetration in developing countries where the data are available. We have built an educational product on top of WhatsApp enabling these students to study online using the resources available to them. They can now search, solve, define and download question sets online - without any new tech being introduced into their homes.

Scalability:

We have a large TAM (315M), and have found good initial traction - +100k total users, ~5k DAU, ~20k WAU since launching in August 2020. This indicates a high virality constant, suggesting that with small tweaks to adapt FoondaMate to different local contexts it will be a highly scalable solution.

Scale of problem in communities: the scale varies depending on how under-resourced schools in the area are.

What contributes to the problem: high cost of mobile data, poorly resourced schools, lack of access to resources outside of schools (e.g. public libraries). This is exacerbated for students from low income households, whose parents cannot afford to supplement the lack of resources provided in communities and schools.

Number of people affected: 315M students across Africa, LATAM and Asia are affected by low-quality schools + limited internet access.

FoondaMate is a chatbot available in English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa, isiZulu, isiNdebele, Siswati, Sepedi, Xitsonga, chiShona and Tshivenda.

Students can use FoondaMate to search the internet, define words, download past papers and get help solving simple math equations.

To see a demo please visit this link and this link.

All code has been written by the founders, and we do not use any out of the box chatbot solutions as they cannot accommodate the languages that we use. Many of these languages have very limited or non-existent NLP built for them, and so we are both accumulating the data and creating the code for this at the same time.

Who is FoondaMate for: FoondaMate is for students who have access to a basic smartphone, but limited internet access and digital literacy. We provide "last mile connectivity" for these students.

How are these students underserved: these students generally do not have a computer in their home or school. While they have access to an entry level smartphone they have limited understanding of the device, or cannot afford to conduct multiple searches and/or download educational applications.

What we know about their needs: though 

FoondaMate was born during lockdown in South Africa. The founders experienced a lack of resources while in schools, with teachers dictating notes being the primary way information was communicated and stored. They realised that with schools shut students in South Africa would be unable to study, and launched FoondaMate in August 2020. By November they had 40k users. By Jan 2021 FoondaMate was being used in 9 other African countries.

Even with the easing of lockdowns worldwide, we have continued to see growth and uptake across the world. We have reached +100k students across the world.

We were attracted to the challenge of equitable classrooms because we have seen through building FoondaMate the extent to which there is a disparity between what students in developed and developing countries can access. Through providing last-mile internet connectivity we are able to reduce that disparity. We believe that this is aligned with the goals of the challenge, and have already seen significant uptake.

We have already been used by +100k students across three continents, and so we feel that we have moved beyond the pilot stage.

However, we are still seeing a high volume of new users each day and are looking to adapt the product for additional regions - specifically India and South East Asia. We will be truly scaling once these regionally specific versions of the product are rolled out - and thus are currently still in the growth stage.

FoondaMate uses existing technology (messenger applications) to provide online education to students with limited internet access. This is innovative because we are able to take the basic technology that students in developing countries already have access to, and build an educational application on top of it. The result is they get the same access to education as their peers in developing countries without having to buy any additional hardware. Because the cost of this hardware is often prohibitively expensive, this is hugely equity enhancing.

This will change the market by reducing educational inequalities between the global North and the global South. Today the country you are born in hugely affects your chances at achieving educational success, but with FoondaMate we aim to change that - enabling anyone from anywhere to access high quality educational information through their favourite chat applications.

Currently serving: 20k high school students per month

In one year: 100k high school students per month

In five years: 1M high school students per month

We are using, in order of priority:

1. Number of DAU

2. Number of MAU

3. Number of times a monthly user begins a conversation with FoondaMate

To measure the total impact the product has had we are looking at the umber of question sets downloaded (+1.6M), as well as the number of concepts searched for and equations solved associated with each download. 

Full-time:

Tao Boyle, co-founder

Dacod Magagula, co-founder

Zodwa Nho, community manager

Part-time:

Mmathabo Pule, junior software engineer

Lubabalo Nyauza, junior software engineer

Our team has all experienced the problem themselves, and we actively try to hire people who attended under-resourced schools in low income or rural areas.

All founders and staff have strong analytical and technical skills, and are required to pass a technical test (in the case of the founders this was literally building FoondaMate - which we thought was a fair test).

We also understand the how students engage with technology because we were students ourselves not so long ago. We have been able to build on this understanding by constantly engaging with our users, and learning more about what they need from supplementary educational resources.

We actively look for team members who experienced a lack of resources while at school. While this this does not translate into quotas of any kind, it means that our team all come from previously disadvantaged communities. 

Although our team is still very small, we are very proud of how diverse we are:

- 60% of our team is female

- 80% of our team is balck

- 100% of our technical team is black

We are applying to Solve because we believe that we could learn and give back within the solve community. We are specifically looking to learn about negotiation, contracts, business administration, fundraising and public relations.

However, we have gained so much knowledge on building global products, NLP for languages with limited written content, finding product market fit, creating vitality in semi-online communities, making educational content relevant and local via chatbots and so much more. We would love to help other Solvers get their solutions into the communities where we work, and believe that our knowledge could save them a lot of time and frustration while doing this.

Business Model:

We have completed successful pilots, but would like guidance on structuring long term contracts with colleges and financial service providers after reaching 1M users. We have had interest from banks in signing 2 year long contracts - but have been nervous about taking on such long contracts when we are still so young as a company. Balancing the needs of clients with the demands of our users is very important to us, and structuring contracts so that the incentives are aligned is crucial here. Guidance on this would be appreciated.

Financial:

We have a deck and have raised USD78k to date, as well as going through an accelerator. Here we would mostly appreciate introductions to investors, and access to angel investors in the Solve network.

Public Relations: 

We would like assistance with generating media buzz around FoondaMate, and improving our social media content to make it more relevant for our global users.

We would like to partner with educational content creators who are looking to increase access to their content in under-served communities. 

Some content we have in mind that could be adapted for FoondaMate include MIT opencourseware lectures and content. We would also love to parter with organisations like Complexly, Khan Academy, and Code Academy and distribute their content to our users.

We believe that there is already incredible content available for high school education, and see FoondaMate as increasing the number of people who can access this content. To this end, we are interested in partnering with high quality content creation teams.

FoondaMate qualifies for this prize because we are equalising access to education in developing countries around the world.

Developing countries tend to lag behind developed countries on most educational fronts, but this problem is especially acute in STEM. By enabling students to study for subjects like math, physics and biology using low-data messenger applications and entry level smartphones, FoondaMate makes STEM education accessible to those who previously struggled to access it.

This is especially important in Sub-Saharan Africa, where there is a huge lack of qualified STEM teachers - and so for some of our users FoondaMate is the only way they are able to access educational content in math, physics and biology.

Over 65% of FoondaMate users identify as women. While they attend schools, unfortunately schools and classrooms can be sites of gender discrimination - affecting the access to resources and teachers for female-identifying students.

FoondaMate enables students to study on their own terms, without input from potentially discriminatory teachers or classmates. We see female-identifying doing this, as they are our most active users.

We use natural language processing to analyse and classify hundreds of thousands of messages from students and enable them to access resources from the internet.

We will use the prize money to hire a dedicated staff member to work on our NLP and improve our functionality, specifically for under-represented languages.

FoondaMate qualifies for this prize because we are equalising access to education in developing countries around the world.

Developing countries tend to lag behind developed countries on most educational fronts, but this problem is especially acute in STEM. Students using FoondaMate are able to access study resources in low-data and low-tech environments, including STEM resources they may not be able to access at school.

This has poverty alleviating consequences for the individual students, especially those who are selected to apply for colleges and bootcamps via FoondaMate because of their active engagement with our STEM material.

However, there are also poverty alleviating consequences for their communities through the positive externalities associated with a more educated population (including reduced crime, increased civil engagement and increased economic activity), as well as for younger children in the community through the role model effect.