mJangale: Improving STEM Education in Senegal

We propose a hands-on extracurricular STEM program to inspire and elevate Senegalese children and young adults

While digital literacy skills are crucial for the 21st century, the Senegalese education system does not integrate them in the curriculum due to lack of resources, such as trained teachers or IT infrastructures.

To address this crucial issue, we created mJangale, an after school program welcoming children from 1st to 12th grade across Senegal.

mJangale proposes STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) workshops from game development with Scratch and mobile app development with MIT App Inventor to artistic coding with p5.js. Our star program for girls is fashion tech.

The learning and teaching methodologies focus on short lectures, hands-on sessions, projects, design thinking activities, teamwork, prototyping, oral presentations and talks from guest speakers.

mJangale emphasized data collection for monitoring and evaluation, collaborating with education and tech experts, creating a network of tutors, and the involvement of parents in their children’s learning.

More than 850 participants (55% of girls) were trained to date in Thiès, Dakar and Ziguinchor. With more education in STEM, we are fostering the next generation of innovators, educators, and leaders.

Our project is innovative in its design. We develop our own STEM curricula and offer regular activities adapted to the Senegalese context. Our star program is fashion tech to leverage technology and African fashion. Our business model is innovative; we offer paid classes and free classes for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. We plan to sell our STEM kits (LilyPad Arduino - Carrapide and Baobab) online to invest this money in supporting more children.

Technology is at the center of our solution as we are proposing a STEM program that is based on the offering of a wide range of workshops to provide youth in Senegal with 21st century skills.

Our goal over 12 months is to reach one more city (Kolda) in Senegal and to have training more than 1200 young Senegalese this year. 

We would like to become the reference in terms of STEM education in Senegal. Our vision integrate working with the Ministry of Education and cities to offer regular programs in STEM.

Mentors certified by mJangale will duplicate our programs and methodology. They are teachers and university students from diverse disciplines. Our curriculum is documented and accessible to organization who want to use it.

We trained more than 850 children to date and cover four cities of Senegal: Thies, Dakar, Ziguinchor and Rufisque. 

We have several paying customers who trust us.

We keep in touch with the students that we train through Facebook groups, and, more and more, via WhatsApp groups. The students who attend our programs come back and, once at the university, become mentors.

Through our network of mentors and strategical partnerships, we hope to serve more than 1500 young Senegalese in 12 months and 5000 in 3 years.

We are passionate about education and aware of its power. We want to see young Senegalese as contributors rather than users of technology and content. We are amazed each time we teach one of our programs to see so much creativity and enthusiasm amongst young Senegalese. We love to see this and want to make a difference in the life of as many children as possible. This is part of the mission of mJangale. 

Our team is composed of experts in technology, education and management (agile methodologies) with an international perspective. 

mJangale is a social startup. Apart from external funding, we are working on establishing a sustainable revenue model. mJangale’s revenue comes from tuition from regular and intensive after-school classes. The pricing depends on the topic, the intensity of the program, and the type of customers. We are subsidizing the cost of some of our programs, i.e. organizations are paying more than individuals. mJangale will sell education Arduino kits online to an international audience and in local libraries to further subsidize the price of its programs. After-school coding programs are growing rapidly worldwide, including in the developing world.

We think this is a good opportunity to present our startup in an international context. meet partners and other entrepreneurs (with the same problems and desires), share and learn from their experience, and gain visibility and recognition. 

We are interested in scaling faster and serve more students with more programs. We did not reach our full potential due to resources constraints. Our network of mentors is not growing fast enough to reach more students.