The ReFunza Project

According to IRC, refugees in East Africa face systemic barriers to formal employment and economic activities. 

Adaptive learning technologies can bridge these barriers affordably and scalably - but all adaptive platforms are online, and less than 30% of the refugee population has access to online tools. But many more have access to basic phones with SMS, which presents an opportunity for innovation.

M-Shule is the first mobile learning platform to combine AI with text messaging to deliver tailored tutoring and education to learners from marginalized populations especially women and will work with Xavier Project to channel this through RLOs to coordinate their reach within the refugee communities. M-Shule’s platform delivers content on basic phones. Then M-Shule analyzes performance data and shares insights with parents, teachers, and organizations. By making advanced learning innovation possible with the simplest feature phone, M-Shule unlocks new opportunities for millions of refugee learners across Sub-Saharan Africa. 

42% of girls in Sub-Saharan Africa drop out of primary school - the highest rate in the world. Poverty forces parents to make short-term decisions, keeping girls out of school to work or marry young. In turn, many girls grow up without learning how to read or write, excluding them from future economic opportunities. But if girls received personalised, quality learning support they need to thrive - in or out of the classroom - and parents had the data to see the positive impact of their investment in education, twice as many girls could escape learning poverty. 

Adaptive learning technology, which uses AI to tailor content to learners’ personal performance, has been proven to increase skills and knowledge for marginalized learners up to 100%. However, all of these adaptive options are online, and fewer than 20% of the African population has access to the internet and smart devices. Only 35% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa will be online by 2023, while many instead use basic feature phones that can call and text. Without accessible technology, there are few to no options for girls to affordably continue their education.

Meaning “mobile school” in Swahili, M-Shule’s platform uses AI to provide personalized learning, life skills development, and data tracking over SMS. Learners access academic content on the most basic phones, with no need for smartphones or the internet. After signing up over text, the adaptive learning platform uses SMS interactions to deliver personalized lessons and micro-courses that adjust difficulty level and topic pathways to learners’ individual needs, backgrounds and performance. Learners receive harder content as they do well or easier content if they need to build foundational knowledge. Their learning profile continuously updates their progress and selects the best next sets of content and information to maximize their potential. 

As learners progress, the platform analyzes data and delivers reports and analytics to parents, teachers and schools through SMS and web. These insights allow organizations to save time in measuring performance, identifying learner needs, and making better decisions. 

M-Shule is the first innovation in the market that makes personalized learning accessible and affordable for all learners, even the vulnerable and low-income. By delivering an all-in-one learning platform possible with the simplest feature phone, M-Shule unlocks new opportunities for millions across Sub-Saharan Africa. 

M-Shule designed a platform to serve the vulnerable low-income learners in Sub-Saharan Africa, to ensure that every student has the opportunity to learn no matter their income, age, or gender. We serve 150 million primary students in Sub-Saharan Africa - marginalized communities where 90% of the population is low-income or in poverty. Our refugee learners live in under-served areas, from camps to urban centres where families can make as little as $70 per month. This population owns feature phones or basic smartphones, but spend little money on data or mobile connectivity. Parents often have insecure incomes and make tough decisions in their children’s education. In order to properly reach and innovate the solution, M-Shule will be working with Xavier Project who have for years been partnering with refugee-led organisations (RLOs) to implement community development projects effectively and efficiently with the aim of sustaining activities beyond project periods.

M-Shule built this platform in collaboration and with feedback from refugee-led organizations, schools, and more than 5,000 parents and students. We continue to conduct surveys and interviews to understand how we can improve learning for our students. As one of our users said, M-Shule “equalizes us as parents and students” - building a future where all individuals are economically empowered with the right skills to not just survive, but thrive. 

M-Shule’s personalized SMS-based platform therefore helps offline communities use affordable, accessible technology to improve skills and prepare for the 21st century workforce. 

By using our product, learners significantly improve their academic and skill development outcomes, based on international standards; increase 21st century skills like self-efficacy, digital and data literacy, and problem-solving; and improve their business and livelihoods. It will be easier and less expensive to help marginalized and vulnerable populations unlock new economic opportunities, who otherwise would not have access to relevant and valuable tools to learn key skills.

Inclusive, impactful education for refugee learners in Africa must meet them where they are, leveraging existing resources and communities, and provide the platform to advance skills. We combine the power of AI and adaptive learning with accessibility of SMS to tailor relevant, engaging content for each learner, increasing their skill acquisition; facilitate collaboration and support all stakeholders with data; and make innovation affordable even for low-income learners. This means that learners can continue learning even if they are at home, education interrupted by finances or emergencies; and parents and schools have the information they need to support their specific needs.

M-Shule has successfully delivered accessible, tailored, and impactful SMS training programs to more than 20,000 households in 8 languages across 20 counties in Kenya, especially for low-income and marginalized learners, refugee communities, and educational institutions. After using our SMS micro-courses, learners improved their exam scores by 20% or more; 600 refugees successfully built savings groups; and 98% of 2000 youth reported they were able to apply the knowledge to their jobs. With a proven platform in multiple communities, we’re seeking to build our experience and expertise in partnership with Xavier Project who will provide community engagement, mobilisation and outreach with their network of refugee-led organisation (RLO) partners.

M-Shule is the only platform in Africa to combine the “appropriate technology” of  text messages with personalized training, ensuring equitable access to impactful educational resources for all refugee communities. Current training options are mostly in-person learning, which are difficult especially for women and girls to access considering travel restrictions, household duties, and gender norms leading to high attrition; or, online platforms that are out of reach since women are less likely to openly own smart devices than the men. In M-Shule’s past projects, women directly said that our approach allowed them to save time by learning at their own pace when they have free time at home. On the content side, Xavier Project has directly worked with refugee-led organisations in various contexts and strengthened their capacities to specifically explore various aspects of gender, including differentiated gender analysis, cultural norms and stereotypes, gender disparities in opportunity and leadership as well as third genders. 

Combining best practices in AI with simple SMS on the tech platform combined with domain expertise unlocks transformative opportunities to upend learning poverty for refugee learners, for as little as $1 per month, M-Shule allows personalized, accessible and affordable tutoring and training to reach every student or teacher - reducing costs and increasing return on educational investment.

Since M-Shule launched in mid-2017, we have been able to develop our adaptive learning platform from scratch - including knowledge graphs, student accounts, predictive modeling, generative content tools, data analytics, SMS and chatbot distribution platforms, and more than 40,000 content items in literacy and numeracy. We have sent out 1.3+ million messages to more than 20,000 learners. In one year, we aim to reach 100,000 learners from marginalized communities and in 5 years, we will reach 1 million learners from low-income and marginalized communities across East Africa. 

We will measure the impact of our program through:

1. Student Performance: Using the data on our platform and from partner organizations, we will be able to measure the number of learners; understand how often users engage with the platform and how many lessons they complete; and track lesson performance, including literacy, numeracy and life skills. This will include changes in classroom exams and in 21st century skill assessment.

2. Parent engagement: Off the platform, we will track impact on children’s household-level support, including with parental guidance courses, informational messages, and community support. We will work with RLOs to track parental feedback through surveys and focus groups. 

3. Learner confidence and satisfaction: We will survey learners themselves to understand how an accessible learning platform increases their self-confidence, self-efficacy, and satisfaction in their schooling. 

4. Community engagement: We will survey the effect of pioneering the solution through an RLO and its cascading effect on the overall reach, sustainability and overall impact of the solution. 

The measurable effect will be:

• Increase in literacy and numeracy performance on classroom, national, and international exams.
• Overall change in performance
• Change in rate of performance increase
• Rate of moving from failing to passing
• Increase in 21st century skills – digital literacy, self-efficacy, communication, problem-solving, etc. based on qualitative reports. 
• The increase in capacity of RLOs to lead their own community development projects

M-Shule is a For Profit Social Enterprise that has partnered with an International Non-Governmental (Nonprofit) Organisation, Xavier Project.

25 full time staff from both organisations (M-Shule and Xavier Project)

M-Shule’s team combines experience in African education at scale with technological innovation that drives us to design learning products for sustainable, ecosystem-level change. Our CEO Claire Mongeau has 9 years’ experience working in accessible education and social business, including managing community engagement across 100,000 learners at Bridge International Academies (the largest low-cost private school chain in the world) in Kenya, and designing programs serving low-income learners in India and the US. Our CTO, Julie Otieno, brings 6 years of experience working in technology for development, from growth systems at GE to SMS learning at Arifu to vaccine stock management with CHAI. The rest of the team brings more than 60 years of combined experience in learning design, data science, learner experience, research and project management. 

M-Shule and Xavier Project both actively promote women achievement and leadership, both in our teams and in our work. M-Shule’s leadership team is 75% women, with 100% of the team based in East Africa. We promote gender equity in our programming, including girl-focused outreach and courses for marginalized groups. Finally, we incorporate gender responsiveness in all of our course content, ensuring that examples and stories show empowered women. 

75% of Xavier Project’s leadership team are female and they have strong expertise in delivering female-only projects, including an ongoing multi-year project focused on training female participants on advanced ICT skills. The Capacity Strengthening and Sharing Course has modules aimed at increasing the capacity of the RLOs has modules specifically on gender and inclusivity that address and challenge gender norms and stereotypes as well as highlighting other genders. Other modules on community development projects tackle programming approaches that specifically address inclusivity issues within the refugee communities. 

Solve has a long and successful history of supporting impact projects around the world. We are excited to work with 1) Solve’s MIT community to build our technology and platform, helping us use our platform data to automatically contextualize content and build for as many diverse learners as possible; 2) the startup community to understand how others have improved and access; and 3) the member community to accelerate our scale and access. 

Solve’s networks, mentorship, and strategic expertise will help us identify new revenue opportunities to grow sustainability; prepare for scale to new markets with different educational needs while maintaining platform quality; better analyze learner interaction data to improve the product; and implement programs to track long-term knowledge and 21st century skill growth. 

This funding and community will allow us to understand and invest in critical talent and resources to grow our impact. We aim to identify and hire new technical and learning design talent, as well as invest in project development, market growth and professional development for our existing team. 

This funding will further enable us to scale our community outreach by partnering directly with RLOs embedded within the community and supporting their efforts to lead the change for maximum benefit, efficiency and sustainability. 

Xavier Project has considerable experience in working with refugee-led organizations and  communities in the field, having also implemented similar SMS-based projects. Our biggest organisational gap is on the technology side, where we will be mostly reliant on M-Shule for technical support and training for our staff.

M-Shule brings technological expertise and learning adaptation and design for marginalized environments that will be complemented by Xavier Project’s connections and approach. Our combined largest gap is in the most efficient analysis of offline versus automated data that is actionable for all stakeholder groups, for which we will seek external support. 

We seek partners to help us in the scale and distribution of our platform. For example: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Compassion International, DBS Foundation, Dubai Cares, Johnson and Johnson, Nike (Girl Effect), Save the Children, Teach for All

We also seek product mentorship and guidance. For example: MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Behavioral Research Lab, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, MIT MIT Statistics and Data Science Center

We seek to expand our refugee-focused learning and training SMS platform to even more communities. We now aim to expand and build this platform to reach 10,000 refugees in the next 6 months. This funding will allow us to expand our content database, increase the number of languages on the platform, and reach more refugee learners in vulnerable areas. This funding will also enable us to effectively partner with refugee-led organisations by strengthening their technical and financial capacity to implement and lead this innovation beyond the project period.

Our solution aims to prove that refugee-led, community-based organisations (RLOs), with the support of the right digital platforms, can promote better economic opportunities for refugee women and their local communities. We want refugee leaders and participants - both men and women - to challenge gender disparities from the root causes throughout project implementation, from engaging in training content to supporting group learning to tackling gender stereotypes. This holistic approach that takes refugees’ current situations and devices into account can catalyse gender transformation, by promoting the roles of women representatives at all levels of community leadership as well as in the business environment. The project has the power to challenge normative definitions of personal success or community development that might have been framed in male-dominated discourse.